


my sweet adversary

by sade12



Category: Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Genre: + Utivich is essentially a blank slate so I gave him a bit more oomph, Alternate Canon, Backstory, Character Study, Dialogue Heavy, Hans Lawnmower, Hans/Aldo if you squint, Lmao I gave Hermann an entiiiire personality., M/M, Rating May Change, Universe Alteration, tags to be added as we go
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2019-06-11
Packaged: 2019-07-02 17:00:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 41,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15800805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sade12/pseuds/sade12
Summary: Thedealscene and forward, but featuring a blossoming intrigue.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A word, everyone. Gather round, gather round.  
> You probably saw the relationship on this fic and thought "............?" or perhaps even ".............!"
> 
> I'll be honest with you, when I write things for this fandom I start out with one or two ideas and wing my way from there. I really like writing Hans and I throw him into random situations and see how he fares with it. I'm currently sitting on several other stories, the contents of which you'll all {hopefully} see soon jajaja.  
> I had this thought that essentially went, "you really can just pair Hans up with anybody huh?" because he's in the most chapters and I thought, who are the most unlikely candidates? Then I dartboarded it, and... Well, if you're reading this, you know what you're in for.  
> Okay, this is important: You've all watched the movie, and thus you must know about the dreaded Tarantinoverse.  
> Anyone with a knowledge of WW2 goingson or the faintest awareness of 20th century technological advancements by chronology knows that this movie is fundamentally impossible. The type of lighting in the kino was reserved for the war effort, Hans' rotary phone didn't exist yet in 1944, et cetera. However, the Tarantinoverse theory essentially says, and this is verbatim; "Durrrr, Tarantinoverse. Don't question it."
> 
> This pisses me off greatly.  
> So I took immense creative liberties in breaking the fundamental structure of the universe. Q: "How is Utivich that young when conscription started in 1941?" A: "Tarantinoverse." However, I have some ties to reality; I changed Hans' title from Herr Oberst for example ~~because that was a very, very regrettable mistake let's all be honest.~~  
>  Lol. This is so much fun to write, honestly. Written somewhat like a comedy so if you get more laughs out of this than you did the movie I will have succeeded. I'm enjoying myself and I hope you enjoy this, too!  
> Really, thank you immensely for comments, kudos, bookies and etc. You guys make my literary life worth pursuing. Thank you for giving me the time of day and motivating me to write. Love you! ^_^
> 
> (Other notable changes are that I made Utivich speak German... the rest of the stuff I changed about him function as would headcanons, so that's all of that. ~~I get so worried writing him tho, I'm worried I'm like projecting his entire personality like in the movie he doesn't mfn talk I barely know who he is~~ )
> 
> Title is a lyic from [this song!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35170sSHv4k)

 

 

Hans splays a wide, spokesman-esque smile at no particular person. “Gentlemen. To history, and it's witnesses.”

_Clink._

Or _chink,_ which sounds a lot closer to the sound that’s birthed from the meeting glasses. Aldo presses a bit too hard into it and some of his Chianti goes soaring, some hitting Hermann, and surprisingly the only reaction to this is an intense glare which is pacified by a shrug from Hans. He says something in German to him, just loud enough for a translation to be possible. Utivich can make out the edges of it; “They’re so juvenile.” There’s more, but he can’t keep up with it.

It came up every now and again at school, there was an after-school class for it. He’d only stay until his mother came to walk him home, and on bad nights, until it got dark. Foreign Languages. He could memorize blocks of text and translate them in a matter of minutes, he could string together long conversations if needed. Even when the draft came around, he didn’t think it would ever come into applicable use, but life tends to be an infinite cornucopia of surprises.

Feeling a need to stay animated and occupy his hands, in his left he rolls his glass while the other jitters behind his back. Utivich flinches when Aldo leans, nearing his head. The drawl of his voice fills his ear, overtaking Hans’ and Herman’s discussion about what seems to be flavors of Italian wine and current events. Minimalist art and types of string music. Oversea affairs and ankle garters.

“What’d he say?”

“Nothing important. ‘Called us, um, juvenile.”

“Psssh. ’Figures.”

Utivich shrugs into him, stares at the floor past downcast lashes. “Yeah.”

There’s a solid, warm hand on his opposite shoulder, patting down once and pressing firmly. It isn’t so much that this is the first real closeness he’s known since entering France- though it is- and more that it’s Aldo. He’d expect to be carried bridal style by Hugo before getting any type of anything from Aldo, especially not twice in one night. So in this, he lets himself smile.

He feels lucky.

“You alright?”

Aldo’s voice sounds unusual when he whispers. His voice sounds better, unquestionably; more even and smooth, but it’s in a distinct lack of something when not projected. It’s barely being heard, though; the majority of Utivich’s mental energy currently sunk into Hans’ speech.  
“-If you hit someone that hard, it’s, at that point, an act of mercy. Right? Your-” something that sounds like _menschlichkeit,_ but it’s too quiet to make out fully– “has already been-”

“You alright?”

Utivich stammers some, clearing his throat needlessly. “Uh, yeah. Sorry. I just-”

“Nah, it’s fine. I see you. What’s it now?”

“They’re talking about... Donny. Weird, huh?”

“How about?”

“The bat thing. I didn’t know they knew about that?”

“It don’t surprise me much… Word gets around quick, don’t it.”

A weird taste gets into Utivich’s mouth, and he clicks his tongue a bit trying to clear it. He nods, and after one more squeeze Aldo’s hand is gone. With it goes the steadying warmth.

There’s a lull in Hans’ conversation, as well, and he makes this impatient grin at Hermann, bouncing once on his soles. “Well. I think...” He says, abruptly in English, throwing a look towards the Basterds, then— a particularly long glance at Utivich. “Now is the time for refills, isn’t it, gentlemen? Aren’t we getting dry? I see empty glasses.”

Utivich realizes he’s being pointed at, and blinks.

“Yes, you, Little Man.”

He darts his eyes at Aldo for help, who just shrugs. He looks back at Hans, glass threatening to slip out of his hand. “I, um.”

Without confirmation from anybody, Hans has flown back behind the table and secured the pitcher again. “I do love this drink. Light, exceptional flavor. Crisp and thorough, but not overwhelming with the grapes nor aftertaste.” While pouring him more, he asks Hermann if he agrees in German, to which he’s given an affirming response. He sweeps past Aldo, now sat, and plants himself before Utivich.

“Given that it took you all of four minutes to finish your drink, I’m going to give you a little bit less this time. We can’t get too intoxicated, I mean. The night just started. Pacing, Utivich.” The bottle is raised upward, then suspended for a moment as Hans locks their eyes together.

The Jew Hunter ought to be carved out of marble with how rigid he becomes in the moment, seldom even breathing. Just like seemingly everyone can do, he immediately petrifies into marble and becomes monolithic. Utivich figures that’s simply a thing war can... do to people, a quirk it can breed within them, but it only amplifies the sort of insecurity that’s long since been sat in his very core, grand and inexhaustible.  
He’s flinching now; Hans looks at him for too long, measuring him with this concrete stare as his smile... fades. Just goes. Utivich feels his bloodstream run cold.

A sweaty, clammy feeling overtakes his palms. He looks to Aldo for help, who’s occupied in a staring contest with Hermann from the looks of it. Again, his glass jolts.

Hans clicks his tongue, straightens his posture. Retracts the pitcher, almost coddling it. “You know something, could I ask you a question?”

“Sure?”

“How old are you?”

Utivich darts his eyes at Aldo, who shakes his head.

“Just a question,” Hans asserts. “No foul play.”

“I’m twenty five.”

There’s something about the way Hans’ eyes seem to almost dull, as does the entirety of his face. It was clear a nerve had been struck. He flexes his jaw once, twice — and then, as if nothing had ever happened, he’s smiling again. A brightness dawns.

“Pardon my rudeness in even asking, I... I just looked at you and thought, should I really be serving drinks to a minor? Hah! You must understand, I’m very cautious!” With this, Utivich’s glass wells in soft red that quickly turns to burgundy. “Such a wonderful color. Now this, this is an aphrodisiac.”

“Right. Thanks.”

But Hans doesn’t move.

He stands motionless, still holding the pitcher with this expectant look. His eyes beckon, almost as effectively as the image of a crooked finger, threatening to pull him down into the depths of the dark brown which composes them. Utivich blinks what feels like ten times before taking a micro-sip, nodding in thanks and forcing an acknowledging smile.

“It’s really good.”

Not taking his eyes off Utivich, Hans says in German, “Eighteen.”

Hermann faithfully picks up the line. “That is exceptionally generous of you to say. That is a generous, generous number.” Then, after a pause, “Puberty is an extensive process for some people.”

“Do you know the draft age over there? In America.”

“Uh... hmm. Regretfully, I’m not sure. I assume twenty-something?”

“Regardless, eighteen.”

Hermann chortles. “Indeed, Standartenführer.”

“Well, Utivich,” Hans muses aloud, again in English. Every syllable rolls off his tongue. “Not thirsty anymore, I take it?”

A warm flush hits him, one like embarrassment. “I'm just pacing, like you said. I don’t want to be the only person to get to drink.”

“Oh! How considerate! Humility is such a defining characteristic. You chose your men very well, Lieutenant.”

“I know I did,” Aldo spits.

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that tone and that I only heard the words,” Hans responds, equally as vitriolic as he pours Aldo another glass. “That was a compliment.”

“Uh,” Utivich calls, incidentally hailing Hans’ attention; “This might be a redundant thing to ask. But where are we... sleeping tonight? Because this place... I mean, it’s great. But.”

“Where would you like to sleep?”

“...On a bed?”

“On a bed,” Hans echoes. After a moment, he practically vaults backward onto the table’s surface, then sitting on it. He crosses his legs. “Where would you like for this bed to be?”

“In a room?”

“With four walls and a ceiling, I assume?”

“Preferably, yeah.”

“Then be my guest. You can find one of several inns some blocks down and spend a night with your beloved Lieutenant.”

“Really?” Getting a glimpse of the disgusted look from Aldo and Hans’ very encompassing laugh, he pales. “I don’t mean– the second part. Not the second part, uh. I mean, we can leave?”

“You can try to.”

“That means no, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, yes. But you could certainly _try_ to leave. I can’t deter you from that. In fact, I would revere you both for such gallant efforts.”

A little line of worry between Utivich’s eyebrows smooths out. He stands a bit taller, too.

Hans files these things neatly away in the corridors of his mind, all labeled and color-coded for later reference; another way to use up spare time. He can’t picture himself sleeping too well tonight, anyway.

This Utivich – this... child, if Hans is going by appearance only – is the outlier. Quite frankly, he’s the one Basterd that operated somewhat as would a ghost; mysteriously, the name ‘Smithson Utivich’ only came up from the soldiers he’d interrogated and not once on any official documents. Odd, odd.  
Emerging from what he considers his own little slice of Alexandria’s Library, he has a vague thought of picking Utivich clean. He seems easy, just that perfect amount of antsy and ungainly; in other words, molten perfection.

“Could you give us some tips on that?”

Then it’s really there: an index finger, extended in Utivich’s direction, before slowly drawing back into a curve. Hans smiles when Utivich approaches, nursing his Chianti. This is documented.

He whispers- very audibly- “Perhaps if you tell those scary guards by the door a joke, they’ll be inclined to ask me to release you. To which I will gladly accept.”

Aldo scoffs, Hermann snickers.

“Hah. I'll, uh. I’ll think about it.”

“Speaking of. As a hypothetical, gentlemen, tell me. If you _could_ leave, where would you go? What would you do with that freedom?”

“’Love to call the Brass again,” Aldo mutters.

“I’d find a room with four walls, a ceiling and a bed,” Utivich adds.

“Speakin’ of, where exactly are we?”

“We are in the shell of what used to be a prolifically visited hotel. Thanks to optimal French engineering that they probably stole, the lights are still operational as well as, mm, some basic plumbing. You could even take a bath if you wish it.” Hans seems to venture too deeply into thought before half-turning and asking for confirmation on this from Hermann, mellowing when he gets it. “We will be staying here until your little paisanos complete their final act, that theater is unrecognizable, and the beautiful sun of the east rises for us.”

“Poooooetic.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant! As far as I’m concerned those bombs detonating is a ray of sunshine I’ve needed for months,” Hans grins, patting the rotary phone twice. “Oh, do you think it’s too late to call in?”

“Probably,” Utivich says, his voice sounding a bit more helpless than he would have liked. Hans notes this, color-codes it in a soft pink, stores it away.

“Ooooooh, who dares me to call in? Hm?”

Aldo and Utivich are, as expected, silent, Utivich blinking more than necessary again. He clears his throat as Hans cups the receiver — it is almost as if it happens in slow motion. Hermann raises his hand and despite the lack of majority vote Hans is already spinning in numbers, then crossing his legs again and pressing a finger to his lips in a hush.

The line immediately goes flat, but Hans carries on regardless.

_“Bonjooooour?”_

Long pause.

“Is this the highly-renowned, _only_ Jewish-operated theater in Paris? Wonderful, wonderful! I’m fine, thank you. So... I know everyone’s strapped in for tonight’s feature... and I have no heart to tear them away from Goebbels’ latest... cinematic excursion-” Hermann starts laughing- “but is there a chance I could speak to a pair of adjacently Jewish men in seats numbered– hm? What’s that? You’ve lost a leg?”

Utivich fails to suck in a gag and ends up whining under his breath, grimacing. This is also color-coded and stored immaculately.

“My God, what happened? Oh, no. _Pardon._ _Mon Dieu,_ what happened? What? _Vraiment?”_

“We get it,” Aldo grunts. “Shut up.”

“Would you two like to see the rooms our choice staff have dressed for us? Nothing high-class or particularly Parisian anymore, just... four walls, a ceiling and a bed.” Hans begins eye contact, but Utivich can’t maintain it for more than a moment and opts to empty his glass. “And I can see your leg twitching, Aldo, so you can calm down knowing we’re not sharing rooms. Unless we’d like that? Male. Bonding. That would be... male bonding. It’s good for strength of character.”

When nobody speaks up, “Okay, wow. Dead crowd. Tell me, Utivich.” Utivich, respectively, feels his heart skip a beat or several as he’s singled out- “Why is our Hermann the only person acknowledging my jokes? Aren’t I funny?”

“Sure, just... We don’t have much to... say?”

Something must be done about that. Hans taps the table in pattern, a rhythm adding up to some older edition of _Kalinka._ “And why is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are we tired, gentlemen?”

Utivich nods, Hermann fakes a yawn.

“I’m not surprised. You must be exhausted. Oh, this poor thing. I don’t know what your country is doing, throwing men the age of twenty-five into the brutality of war-”

“Aren’t Basterds group of twenty five-year-olds?” Hermann chimes in. Notably in English, as well as heavily accented. Aldo and Utivich seem surprised.

“-where they’re... at the inordinate whim of savages and psychological trauma. _Hermann.”_

“My apologize.”

“Your English is improving,” Hans says in German, voice light and pleased. “But. It’s ‘apologies’, not apologize.’”

“Is it? I will remember that.”

“Additionally, you forgot two words, but that’s less than last time. I see improvement. You score an eighty out of one hundred. And I will allot you five extra points as your joke was funny.”

“Many thanks, Standartenführer,” Hermann beams. “At last a passing grade.”

“You know you’re my favorite muse. But there’s a time and place for everything,” Hans chastises, wagging a finger. He turns back to Utivich, plucking his glass from his hand effortlessly. English, once more: “Firstly, in my mind, you aren’t old enough for Chianti. Secondly, I think it’d be best to get you into a nice, warm bed. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Utivich responds with an expression that is the epitome of desperation, breathing out. Hans likes this look. He color-codes it in a soft red; a blush type of hue. It’s stored very carefully, laminated even. “Yeah.”

Hans claps once. His face comes alive with a newfound brightness.“Your words to God’s ears, Utivich.” He turns. “Lieutenant Raine.”

“Yeah?”

“Bedtime is early tonight. I’m going to have our delightful comedian here direct you to your quarters. Be sure to tip him gratefully when he’s done. He takes spare coins, those little chocolates with caramel filling, and-or cheek kisses. If you don’t compensate him I cannot and will not be accountable for how he chooses to injure you.” Again, Hermann surges in a fit of laughter. Aldo’s eye twitches. “But. Before you go... I’d like to ask something of you.”

“If you even think about-” Aldo says to a grinning Hermann before furrowing his eyebrows deeply. “What?”

“Could I borrow your Little Man?”

“’Your’? Why am I his?” Utivich tries to say, but he’s spoken over. Well, he tried.

The feeling of objectification isn’t anything new in his life, but it is particularly awful here seeing how Aldo would usually speak up for him in these kinds of situations. Speaking for himself is largely a new thing, and he’s still working out the many, many facets of it. It’s more like disarming a bomb than anything else. He could do it in theory, but preferably not alone.

“What d’ya mean, could you _borrow_ him?”

“You know. Could I speak with him for a moment. It’s as if there’s this invisible string that keeps you two tethered.”

“Snip snip, Lieutenant Raine,” says Hermann.

“You shut up. Speak bout what?”

Hans swirls his Chianti around. He shrugs coyly.

“Oh, nah. I know this. Divide and conquer strategy. Landa, if you think I’m backward enough to go a square foot without him in my sight I’m gonna letcha know now you are sadly mistaken.”

“Divide and conquer strategy? What in the _hell-?_ Okay, you’re right to think we could attempt something like that, that is a given. But to do so would be of the utmost pointlessness. You two are our escorts, so... such would just be... counterproductive.”

“Alright. Answer’s still no, though.”

“Listen. I’m a detective, not a military strategist. What will it take for you to trust me?”

“Not a damn thing on the face of this Earth.”

“...What if I said please?”

“Nope.”

“Aw, fickle. What if I said... pretty please? Will that sweeten the deal?”

Aldo’s expression says no.

“You drive a hard bargain, Mr. Raine. Okay, limited time offer. What if I said pretty _pretty_ please and offered you a _third_ glass of Chianti? Hmm?”

“What do you think I’m boutta say?”

“What if I said-”

“You ain’t gone slap a third pretty on there, right? Cause God forbid.”

Hans throws up his hands in a defensive way. “My hands are tied, then.”

“You mean cuffed, Standartenführer.”

After giving Hermann a long _look,_ Hans turns back to Aldo. “What if I offered you... And this is particularly risque and a bit more than my plate can abide, so I’d indulge in this: the non-consensual euthanasia of _every_ Nazi on Earth?”

Hermann gasps. “Scare!”

“I- no, you meant ‘scary’,” Hans whispers. “Scary. Repeat after me. Scary.”

“Scair-hee?”

“Um... well, that’s-”

“When is euthanasia ever consensual?” Utivich tries to add, but Aldo speaks over him.

Aldo doesn’t normally... do that. He remembers the hand that was just on his shoulder and blanches somewhat, expression crumpling. It goes unseen- except for by Hans.

“Would be nice, and I’d love to see you scramblin’ to set all that up, but nah. Also, that’d include you, so I know you wouldn’t go for it. Not trustin’ you.”

"I'm not a Nazi anymore. Those lines have been long since severed."

"'Long as you got on that garb you're as much of a Nazi as Hitler him-fuckin'-self."

Hans' expression flattens. "Do you want me to strip naked."

"Wh-"

"By your logic..." With an exhausted sounding sigh, Hans begins to unbutton his coat; "if this outfit is what makes me devout to National Socialism, then that _must_ be addressed-"

Utivich looks horrified. Hermann looks curious.

"You know what the hell I meant," Aldo says, voice just below a yell.

"You are absolutely no fun. None. Did you know that?" Hans pauses, narrowing his eyes and giving Aldo a very pointed look. He clicks his tongue before turning; “Hermann, did I not just get these men medals? Wasn’t that a part of my demands over the phone? And was I, also, nice enough to remove them from handcuffs going along with the assumption they wouldn’t instantly attack us? And then they have the audacity to refuse to partake in my wonderful, wonderful physique. Have you ever seen such ungratefulness?”

“Bad dog, Lieutenant,” Hermann admonishes.

Aldo pushes himself upward, shoving Hermann back- who manages to adequately stand his ground, smile unfading. “If you don’t shut your fuckin’ bitchass German mouth-”

“Guys.”

Utivich’s voice has the volume it needs, but it is largely toneless. If it hadn’t been for a split second of pause, it wouldn’t have been heard. All attention is directed his way.

Aldo calms a bit. “Yeah?”

“It’s no big deal. It’s not. I’ll do it. ‘Talk to him.”

“See? He understands, Lieutenant.” Before Aldo can yell something rude, Hans moves away, clapping twice. “Hermann!”

“Standartenführer?”

“Show him to his room. The third floor has the good mattresses still, I’ve been told. Give him, let’s see... 304, the one with the big windows? In case he decides being without his last subaltern is too much to bear for all of ten minutes.” Hans pats Aldo on the back as he’s dragged, smiling nothing short of devilishly. “Don’t make me call for reinforcements. It’s better to volunteer than get forced.”

“Okay, okay.” With a gruff sounding exhale, Aldo straightens his jacket and throws one last glance at Utivich as Hermann links their arms. “If anything happens, shout. Got it.”

“That’s an unnecessary precaution,” Hans says flatly, making sure not to overtake Utivich’s quiet ‘yes’. “Now go, go. Be good to Hermann. Remember his tipping policies.”

“What a big, strong man this is,” Hermann hums in German. “What a stunner. Where do you find them?”

With a wink, Hans responds. “That club I told you about.”

Utivich makes a face and Aldo’s not sure if he wants to know what was said.

“Ooooooh!”

“Once we’re in America I’m sure there will be plenty like this up for grabs. Keep your hands to yourself for now, this one is very... aggressive. Unusually so. Bad childhood, I think. He really is just a big dog, like you said. Take heed.”

“I quite like dogs.”

“Nuh-uh-uh. He slobbers. _Copiously._ He might even try to bite you...”

“Oh, joy!”

Hans allows himself a laugh, ignoring the stare he gets from Aldo. “Take him upstairs.”

“I will rub his stomach and see if he responds well to that. I’m sure I have a bag of kibble on me somewhere.”

“Go _upstairs,_ Hermann.”

With a nod, he pulls Aldo out of the room with a force harsher than is really needed.

“Standartenführer, Mr. Utivich,” Hermann calls from the corridor, standing at attention and saluting respectfully. “Goodnight.”  
Whipping around on his heels, Aldo is unfortunately slung with his motion, nigh faceplanting into the wall. In time, their silhouettes begin to dissolve in the dimly lit dark; there’s the faint sound of fabric rustling as Aldo tries to break apart, failing miserably every time. As they begin ascent up the staircase, their rather argumentative-sounding voices fade into nothingness.

Hans sighs.

“Did you hear the way he said ‘good’? Bless his heart.”

“Yeah, that wasn’t...”

“He also thinks ‘goodbye’ and ‘goodnight’ are interchangeable. There it was fine, but he really can’t tell the difference.”

“Did you tell him they’re different?”

“Of course, but... Mm. Maybe I’m just not teaching him well. Do I come across as a capable teacher?”

“I guess?”

After musing to himself for a minute or so, Hans gestures toward the seat Utivich had been sat in before. “Please, make yourself comfortable.”

There are a set of throbbing sores in the front pads of his feet from being dragged around ceaselessly by SS for hours, so Utivich has no qualms with moving to do so. With a nod, he gets to it. Standing for more than five minutes proves an unbearable, silent pain, and he would have been sat this entire time but he felt it unwise to do anything outside of Aldo’s suggestion- or, now, Hans’ suggestion. To him, Hans is... scary, which feels much too immature a descriptive word, but he identifies with it.

The word Hans thinks of when he glazes up and down the face and the body before him is ‘captive’, which feels much too violent- the word bringing on images of age-old torture methods, body-sawing and impalement of all calibers- but it serves. It’s fitting.

Utivich rounds to the chair. It’s as though he can physically feel Hans’ eyes at the back of his head, like a cold pressing up against the back of his neck. He slides into the seat, rolling his ankles underneath the table.

After quietly analyzing everything he’s collected tonight, Hans has an idea.

He sits on it for a moment, and then:

“No,” his voice very full of something indistinct. “The other one. Where Aldo was sitting.”

He hadn’t been pointing at that one at all, and he knows Utivich saw it. He was pointing clear at the chair he’s currently in, not Aldo’s. There’s no way he could’ve mistakenly pointed at Utivich’s former chair; they’re practically a country mile apart.

And yet...

“Oh, sorry.” Without a second thought, Utivich moves.

Such intrigue sits in that.

And when he’s there and closer than before, he looks up at Hans with these perfectly soft and moonlike blue eyes that stand in such sharp contrast to the rosy pale of his skin and the dark of his copious eyelashes. About him is what can only be described as an obliging naivety, and it’s no wonder he’s lived this long. He does what he’s told, and presumably nothing but. A Private needs to be accommodating, after all.  
...That, and, well. Hans understands better than anyone he’s far too past his prime for thoughts like this, but he’s a pretty boy. Conventionally ‘cute’. Doubtlessly. No wonder Aldo likes to have him around—

No, no, _no._ He’s not going _there._

...But he _did_ cherry pick his men. That is a given. That is a fact. That is concrete.

Utivich doesn’t appear particularly skilled at anything save taking orders. The chances of him being a specialist in some area are widely obscure, and that is something that will need to be extracted from the source of it’s true. And if not... Hans will very calmly stick to his original belief and try to be as unbemused as is humanly possible.

Not bemused, astonished.

The ride tomorrow is going to be long, and Hans already imagines his voice imitating that of teasing schoolchildren. _Raine likes pretty boys, Raine likes pretty boys._

Or even worse...

_Hermann, I have good news for you!_

Hans has to cover his mouth to prevent himself from laughing.

Another lull of silence rolls around, Utivich twiddling his thumbs and Hans filling up with a pulsing, deep feeling- the name of which evades him, heat rising in his chest. He takes a tentative sip from his glass. He’s not sure he’s equipped for the many, many places this discussion can mindlessly delve into from here.

So he chooses to be direct. “What is the draft age in America, Smithson?”

“Twenty-one. Why-”

“And how old are you?”

“You already asked me that.”

“Very observant, very observant. But I seem to have forgotten, so I’m asking again.” He points at his temple and swirls his finger. “It happens.”

“Twenty-five.”

“Hmm. I’ll just go ahead and ask you again in case you decide you want to change your answer. Ahem. And how old are you.”

Utivich clears his throat as he would, eyelashes fluttering. He looks around the room as if he’d forgotten why he’d chosen to stay behind, or if he’d forgotten what country he was in. His fingers tangle under the table. Hans likens him to the proverbial white sheep that lost its way.

“Twenty-five.”

Hans pretends he’s speaking to a child, which he essentially is. He levels his voice, letting it fall into a natural kind of temperate evenness, a quiet. “Do you remember what I just did on the phone? We’re done. It’s done. Any more adversity between us is needless. I’m just asking you a question because I’m interested, not for any nefarious purposes.” Utivich seems to respond better to this voice; his features lift slowly alongside it. “I’d just like to know you a bit better.”

Utivich seems incapable of holding eye contact for more than five-second increments. Although it takes an extensive amount of time, the answer does come; “I’m twenty-one.”

But it’s not like that wasn’t already ascertained. Hans knows the broader side of everything already, he’d like to think. His pride and joy is simply hearing it from his subjects of questioning themselves. Stringing liars up by their gills is also a high form of pleasure.  
If this were anyone else, he’d push a little harder, scrape a little deeper, but again – this is a child. It’s most likely Aldo who told him to lie about his age; the reason why is obvious.

“Thank you. Would it make you feel more comfortable to know my age?”

“If you want to tell me, I guess.”

“Twenty-five.”

Utivich almost smiles again, but as goes a flame snuffed, it’s gone in a second.

“What, I don’t look that young? Preposterous,” Hans says, scoffing into his glass. “I’ll be fifty in four months.”

“Oh.”

“In a way, we’re close, if you just shave off or add some thirty years.”

“You don’t look that old.”

“I suppose next you’ll be asking for my dietary regimen as well as my exercise routine. How old do I look?”

“Older.” And for a moment there’s this childlike undercurrent to the words; Utivich looks at his lap again, and lo and behold, he is laughing. It’s just incredibly subtle. 

Hans indulges him in a laugh of his own to ensure the joke wasn’t disliked, and it is as though he can feel Utivich’s face warm up. “Ouch.”

“You actually look a lot younger, to be serious. I thought you were in your... really early forties, I guess.”

“How I wish. Is the gray subtle?”

“Kind of.”

“Oh, well. Luckily, a series of good genes have kept me in the highest graces.” They smile at one another for a beat, before Utivich’s smile vanishes abruptly again and he looks at his hands. Pretty par for the course, Hans thinks.

After a moment of thought, his voice rises again, deep and tinged with slight amusement: “Smithson Utivich.”

Utivich looks back up, giving gentle ascent to both eyebrows. “What?”

“Nothing. I just like the name. It fits the face by which it is beheld.”

“Well, uh. Thank you. Thanks.”

“It sounds like the name of a protagonist in some sort of mystery novel, doesn’t it? Treachery, tragedy, travesties, and Smithson. Very private investigator-esque. You could be a private investigator.”

Utivich shrugs.

“No?”

“Doesn’t seem very me.”

“Then what is very you?”

“I wanna do something calmer than that. It sounds stressful.”

“This career is actually very calm, moreso than the truly dangerous things of this world. When it goes right, that is.”

 _Plus, there’s no one to tell you what to do,_ Hans thinks. He chastises himself, calls himself mean.

“That’s what I mean. There’s too much chance for things to go wrong.”

“Smithson, with everything you could ever do, there is a leeway of failure.”

“I know that, but the consequences with... messing up as a detective are more severe than a milkman missing a house, aren’t they?”

Hans takes a pause. His face becomes particularly statuesque. “Yes.”

“Yeah, then.”

“But if probable failure was a deterrent worth always listening to, I don’t think-” _think the Nazis would be in power._ Hans clears his throat one time, thickly. A rather loaded statement. That could steer the entire conversation off course, he worries, and therefore works around it. “-a lot of powerful people would be where they are.”

“What do you mean?”

“If everyone were as hesitant as you, humanity wouldn’t progress very much, would it?”

“I’m the catalyst for humanity’s progression?”

“A fetching young man such as yourself could easily make his way into government.”

Utivich almost smiles. “Uh, thanks. Not my thing, though.”

“Hypothetical,” Hans says, raising a finger.

“What is it?”

“Let’s say everything neatly falls into place over the course of the, say, next month of your life. Hm?” Hans goes for another sip, rolls his lips over each other. “Once you go home, what would you like to be? What would you like to see yourself butterfly into?”

“I never really thought about it much. I was a sweeper once?”

“But that’s not an ideal line of work, is it?”

“Not really.”

“Precisely. If you could do anything, what would it be? Aside from the humongous blanket term that is ‘calmer than that’.”

“Are you trying to set me up?”

“With a career?”

“Yeah.”

“If you asked me that question three years ago, you were Ostmark-born specifically, you weren’t yet drafted and I particularly favored you, I could give you a definite ‘yes’. And you would have a wonderful career, indeed. How does a metallurgical sound?”

As if Utivich struggles with what emotion to display, his eyebrows furrow momentarily before his lips are tugged upward in what could, more by definition than by show, be a smile.

“Just kidding. Unless you like the smell of burning metals and endless coal. Coal on coal on coal on coal.”

“I kind of want to work in music or something.”

“Oh? A wonderful aspiration. Highly respectable. You’ll be at Carnegie in no time.”

The micro-smile grows and flourishes. The corners of his lips twitch as if he is trying to stop, but cannot. This is also documented.

“What’s your favorite instrument?”

“I like, uh... Well, I used to know how to play the piano, but I forgot.”

“Would you pick it back up?”

“I don’t think I could if I wanted to. My hands shake too much now. I’ll be playing six keys at once on both hands.”

Hans scoffs. “Write your own pieces that require six fingers.”

“Nobody would listen to that. It’d sound weird. Too... busy, you know what I mean?”

“I would buy all of your records.”

“No you wouldn’t.”

“I would if you’d sign them.”

Utivich looks away, hands kneading a bit more insistently than usual. He doesn’t seem displeased, though, entire posture and aura leaning toward something closer to a tint of shyness.

A moment of quiet passes. “One more question. You’re the youngest of the Basterds, aren’t you?”

“Yep.”

“So young.” Hans clicks his tongue. “I can’t imagine what all of this must be doing to you. To spend one’s early twenties in wartime? That’s a lot of blows to a young psyche. How is life like that?”

“It’s hard.”

“How so?”

“I’m just tired. I’m so tired. Everyone died and... is dead.” Utivich blinks as if that’s not what he wanted to say, but he continues; “I just... I hate... I don’t know. I really wanna go home already.”

His inability to word himself is somehow extremely endearing.

“Am I correct in the assumption your home is a dreamland when compared to the nightmare that is here?”

“You have no idea.”

“Who’s there? Mother, father, sister, brother?”

“Yeah. I got a lot of siblings.”

“And I assume they’ll all be at your first orchestra? I can see it already. A quite large-scale-production thing. Velvet seats in reserved booths.”

Utivich looks to the side, and again that half-smile is birthed. He almost giggles, but he holds himself back from it.

“Big house?”

“Big as an apartment can be, yeah.”

“Do you have your own room?”

“I used to.”

“You used to?”

“Baby brother.”

“Ah, ah. Precious. Will you send him my regards?”

His lips upturn and his tongue draws back - he’s aiming to make the ye sound, evidently, but it’s canceled; either an incredibly nervous or incredibly panicked reaction. “You’re a Nazi.”

“Not anymore,” Hans says triumphantly, raising his glass. “That I am still dressed in this uniform is pure circumstance combined with the absence of a nearby closet bearing clothing that fit me. We’re war heroes now. Remember that.”

Utivich shrugs.

He's slippery.

He tilts his head up, somewhat. The way his eyes are narrowed does cry of suspicion, but he says nothing.

“Oh, yes. I was going to ask you. Earlier you said you hated something. What was that? I’m picturing a ‘I hate Nazis’?”

Utivich is knocking his shoes against the legs of his chair. There is the most miniscule shift in his eyebrows.

“Or worse; ‘I hate Hans Landa for restraining me from going upstairs to sleep on a pristine, laced bed in a room with four walls and a ceiling’.”

There it is again; another one of those micro-giggles.

“And if it is that, I understand your incredibly justified frustration. I won’t hold you for much longer, right hand to the Heavens. You could be up there in two minutes if you answer my question.”

“Can you not tell Aldo? If I tell you this?”

“If you have a waiver of discretion, I have a pen.”

“Okay. I hate scalping people. There. And it's weird, 'cause I know they’re Nazis and I like it deep-down, but I hate seeing people’s brains just... like that. All out.”

Hans takes a sip, refiling his internal cabinets to make extra space in his ‘U’ sector.

“It’s like... They... Damn. What’s that word when something...”

“Hm?”

“You know how your heart...? Does the same thing, you know? Beats, yeah, but that’s not the word for the actual thing.”

“Pulsates?”

“Yeah, that. Brains do that, a little. And then they stop. I don’t like looking at stuff like that, it’s...” Utivich has a visual of himself miniaturizing and disappearing into the infinite folds of his shirt to never emerge. “I keep throwing up. I can’t hold down food anymore. Even if I don’t move. I sat down for an hour a week ago and it came back up anyway.”

“I can’t believe I had you drink a full two cups of wine. Two. Have you lost your mind? Are you _trying_ to get an upset stomach? Good Lord, why did you let me give you those?”

Utivich shrugs. “I was thirsty.”

“Did you even eat today?”

“Not really, no. I had a bar and it kinda stayed down. Just spit. I can drink things just fine, though.”

“But... Chianti.You didn’t think that was a bad idea at all. We have water.”

“I thought it’d be rude not to drink it. I mean... I was raised like that. You take a gift because it’s a gift.”

Hans tsks to himself, tutting audibly. That’s touching. He looks aimlessly around, then inspects his glass. His reflection shimmers back at him. “You’re too...”

“What?”

“You shouldn’t be here. Serving. You shouldn’t be serving. You don’t fit the lifestyle it requires.”

“I don’t want to fit the lifestyle it requires,” Utivich says, rather flatly. “Not like I have a choice. I tried to get out of it. I, uh, I tried to dodge the draft... And I did, for... like a week.”

“And how did that go?”

“I mean, I’m here, right? I couldn’t convince my parents to say that I died.”

_"Died?"_

"Fell in the Hudson."

Hans snorts. “How loving of them to not be able to lose you, even hypothetically.”

“Hah... yeah. I haven’t seen their faces in so long. They’re... muddy, now. Is that weird?”

“You haven’t seen them in ages. Absolutely not. Do you send letters?”

Utivich becomes the proverbial child who’d just found a puppy in a present box. His entire atmosphere lifts into positivity. His face colors faintly, cheeks reddening with the smallest of tint. “Yeah. They’d send me stuff, when they could... You know, before I was with Aldo. We moved too much for letters.”

“That’s no problem. There’s no longer a need for them, is there? We’ll be in America in less than a week. I think I should thank your devoutly terroristic Lieutenant for that, which I’ll make haste of doing in the morning. Given he doesn’t headbutt me on sight.”

“He wouldn’t do that.”

“He wouldn’t do that _unprovoked,_ you likely mean. We know two very different sides of the same man.”

“Did he-?”

“I’m still nursing the migraine, but that’s neither here nor there.”

Utivich giggles.

“Very thick skull on that one. Explains his actions and manner of speaking.”

“That’s mean.”

“He didn’t even recoil. Am I right in guessing he’s done it before?”

“Couple times, yeah...”

“Well, there you have it. Now, I should be erected into sainthood for not calling that theater. Think of how many innocent foreheads I’ve saved.”

“Speaking of that, actually.”

“Hmm?”

“Uh... Could I tell you something?”

Hans crosses his ankles, closely analyzing the helpless look that crosses every last inch of that angelic face. It clicks instantaneously, the answer running across his mind. He needs encouragement.

“Go on, go ahead.”

He’s silent.

“What is it?”

“Never mind. I can’t say it. It’s, it’s fucked up.”

“Secrecy, remember? I promise I won’t tell a single soul.”

“I want to, uh... to thank you.” Utivich cuts himself off prematurely. “No. I can’t say it. No.”

“What do you want to thank me for?”

“Nothing. Forget it.”

“Come on. You can tell me. What for?”

“It’s really fucked up.”

Hans leans in. “Then whisper it.”

“For- for not calling the cinema. I know it’s weird, and it’s not alright, but... And I know it’s... You know, fucked, but...”

Utivich has a fleeting wish that the floorboards would just give out and swallow them both. Or just one of them; which exactly, he’s not particular about. His right leg bounces, the sound echoing around the room with the wooden clatter of his heel.

Before things can deteriorate, Hans’ voice rises, purposeful and sonorous. He’s pressing, but in that soft voice that makes it seem as if he’s not. This is just another interrogation, if anything. “It’s not. It’s fine. I admire your honesty.”

“I know, but it’s still-?”

Utivich continues to speak, but is shushed.

“Take a deep breath. In and out.”

There’s that immediate compliance. There’s a lot of words applicable to this Utivich, but Hans believes his favorite is ‘vulnerable’. Vulnerable captive; the best kind there is.

“I just feel like I should say it. But I shouldn’t. But you prevented- like- another three years. By not calling. I could’ve been here for three more years. Or more than that.”

Hans decides there isn’t much going on in his ‘V’ sector anyway, so he clears the entirety of it out to make room for more ‘U’ information.

“Shh.”

“I shouldn’t say that kind of shit. It’s selfish. I’m selfish. I can’t- it’s just-”

“Shh.” Utivich seems moderately stilled. “Shh, shh. It’s not selfish. You miss your family, as do they you.”

“I- I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I understand, I do. You’re weathering a big storm right now, aren’t you? Isn’t it hard?”

Tears are looming, brimming up in the corners of his eyes.  
Only twenty-one and already significantly traumatized from the look of it. The least he can do is comfort him, execute his delusions. Mentally, Hans starts scripting a dissertation about the human condition, storing it for later as a theoretical speech when he accepts his medals.

“I know what you’re thinking, but be rational. They went in on their own volition. They knew the dangers of doing it. They deserve more thanks than I do.”

Utivich nods more than is really necessary, strands of hair tumbling into his browline. He takes one guttural, disproportionately large breath and holds it. It is followed by a calmer sea of more gentle ones. Several long tears fall and his nose runs, but he wipes his face with his sleeve. Messy crier, probably.

Hans sighs. He’s really, really not built for this. Any of this.

“I know... I, I- um. Sorry I’m crying.”

“This is hardly any idea of a formal setting, don't be. You’re okay. Everything is okay. We’re working this out. Together. Aren’t we?”

Small nod.

“Say it. We’re working it out together.”

“We’re... working it out, together.”

“Yes we are. Good, good. Remember to breathe. Will you do that?”

“I... Yeah, I will.”

There’s a tinge of something inside of Hans that’s seldom ever there. Half of it died in the aftermath of the first war, the other half appears sporadically.

He’s always likened himself to an actor who’d get too into character if nobody was there to brace him back from it. That, or his sympathy, as he often fears, truly does fluctuate based on various factors. It, too often, becomes empathy- dangerous and volatile. He looks down into the ravine of those eyes and nearly sees his face, his own face. He has to look away for a moment.  
He always gravitated to the shier, more taciturn types, thinking of them as being like geodes. Full of inner beauty, but with that comes the arduousness of having to use extreme measures to get there. Breaking them open, sure, but doing so delicately as to leave every inner part intact.

“You’re being too nice,” Utivich pushes out. “You’re not like this.”

Hans scoffs nervously because he agrees.

“Is your Lieutenant talking about me in his downtime?”

“I, uh. Yeah.”

“Aldo, Aldo, Aldo. He says a great many things, doesn’t he. What did he tell you? Hm?”

“He... Well, uh, he called you a lot of things. Said you were all schizo a while ago.”

Hans laughs another of those gilded laughs. “I could be schizophrenic... hopefully not, of course, but Aldo can’t tell you that. He doesn’t know me well enough to go around saying such brash things. He’s only met one side of a very multidimensional me. He hasn’t met _nice_ Hans.” This is followed up with an award-winning smile.

“Oh.”

“Do you know why your Lieutenant didn’t meet Nice Hans?”

“I don’t, no.”

“He wanted to meet you first! Ha.”

It may be a trick of the light, but Hans can swear that Utivich’s face flushed.

“You don’t believe that he exists at all, do you?”

“I... you... get why, though, right?”

“Because genuine amity is so rare today? Of course. Smithson, war has a way of stripping men down to their barest and leaving them to then reconstruct themselves from nothing. Things get mislaid.”

Utivich’s eyes widen.

For a moment, a deeply troubled look crosses Hans’ face, features twisting. He frowns at nothing, tasting the actual severity of his words. Where did that come from? How deeply was that embedded?

“That was the realest thing you’ve said all night.”

“I... Ahem. How does your stomach feel?”

“Oh, it’s okay.”

“Let me get you a glass of water. Can I trust you won’t go anywhere?”

Another nod comes as a response.

Hans rises with Utivich’s glass and crosses the room, waving to the soldiers outside that everything is fine. He rolls the glass in his hands, feeling up every impression and shape carved into it, practically straining his ears for any panicked sound of clacking shoes suggesting a getaway. The water runs, and as it does so he tries very hardly to wrap up the entire ordeal that is the existential panic that brought him into.

He returns, and his counterpart is exactly as skittish as he was upon his departure.

He may as well still be handcuffed.

He drinks at length.

Hans will admit he doesn’t now and frankly never had a concrete plan with this. Any seedling that could have grown has long been tangled in this web of feelings and empathetic notions he’s snared within. He is now more interested in seeing what will happen; pushing and seeing if he’s pushed back. So far, he’s not been. The geode is half-open, and he could go to sleep knowing he’s seen half of it, but there could be a rainbow worth of reflective jags and chips just a few more hits away.  
And now, he steadies himself as he leans downward to brush just by Utivich’s ear from behind him. Utivich, in turn, gasps past the knot in his throat. almost choking on his water.

“Do you think you’ll be able to eat tomorrow?”

He sits in silence, slowly lowering his glass, and then impressing crescents into his palm with his thumb’s nail as if trying to desperately confirm to himself he’s not asleep. “I hope so.”

“If everything in the world was available, what would you eat?”

“Mom used to make greased bread filled with spinach.”

Hans takes his time as he rounds back to the table's periphery, then leaning against it. “So naturally, I'd assume, you wouldn’t be sick after having that?”

“No sir.”

“I’ll see what I can do. We’re leaving in some six hours give or take, and we’ll be in an incredible hurry, but have I ever broken a promise? Hm, hm.”

“Oh, no. That’s- thanks, but you don’t have to get me one of those. I doubt that’s out of America anyway, and... I can’t just have one of those. They’re too good. I wouldn’t know how to act around it. I’ve been eating rations and... grass, for the past three months. Not real grass, but close enough.”

“I will get you a spinach-filled greased piece of bread.”

“I couldn’t eat it. I won’t. Thank you, really, but I wanna save one for when I get home.”

“I’m going to get you a spinach, filled, greased, piece, of, bread.”

“No.”

“Why not? It’s the one thi-”

“Not the one thing. We- you know, me, Aldo and... you know. We kept having this awful, stringy pasta and canned baked beans. I used to hate it, but I can actually eat that without being sick.”

“What’s the difference?”

“One’s special.”

“And one is subpar. I don’t see a purpose in extending your torture. Spinach-filled, greased-”

“New rule. It needs to be homecooked or I’ll be sick.”

“Another side of me that your Lieutenant neglected to meet was my internal six-star chef. I would cook it now if the means to do so were at my disposal. What kind of bread is that? I’m imagining a baguette or a roll?”

After a pause, Utivich laughs.

Utivich... laughs, and it’s a very beautiful thing. It’s a wondrous, light sound. Too much of it is out before he can reign himself in properly. And he tries, but more wells of it glow through. He sniffs once he’s done, but his lips are still bowed in the most casually elegant incline.

Hans is moderately transfixed. He clears his throat.

That must be it, then. Indeed, indeed.

Raine likes pretty boys.

They share a look. There’s a quiet gleam of white visible through slightly parted, curved lips and this focused quality of Utivich’s eyes as he glances upward at Hans. And as for Hans, there exists an ever-present scratching impulse at the back of his neck droning on and on; ‘grab him’, and not for any specific reason. Just to do so. Squeeze the air out of his chest in a hug. See how he reacts to that. It’s suppressed, barely.  
He’s just... sitting there, waiting for further instructions with this healthy flush on his face — and Hans fails to stave off a minor grunt. He swallows. He clears his throat, again, getting a bit more than slightly annoyed with himself.

And here is the unrelenting chastisement of the mind-bending atrocity that is empathy and uncontrolled interest; people becoming _people._ Smithson Utivich is now a person. Who matters, to a fault.

He clears his throat _again._

 _Wrap it up,_ he tells himself.

“How tired are you right now?”

“I’m alright.”

“How long do you think it might be before you go _pop_ from sleep deprivation?”

“I’ve got a couple hours left on me, I’m okay.”

“...Is that right?”

“Yeah.”

“You seemed quite keen on a lovely bed a few minutes ago. And weren’t you?”

“It’s cause I wasn’t really... there wasn’t anything to keep me awake back then. I wasn’t really invested in the conversation.”

“Aha. I knew you didn’t find my jokes funny.” _For God’s sake, Hans._ “I’m hurt.”

“No, you’re funny. You’re really funny. I swear. I haven’t laughed like that in a while.”

Hans allows himself a very contented, self-satisfied grin. He watches his reflection dip and dive in the cool of his Chianti. “I live to please.”

“There were a few times when I had a little burst of energy, though.”

“During my jokes, I would expect?”

“Not just at those. I mean, yeah, but...”

“Hmm?”

“You thought I was eighteen,” Utivich says, a laugh tempering his words again. “For a sec, that made me kind of... you know. Think about things.”

The sentence sits between them for a while, Hans still dormant with his eyes closed and relaxed in his posture, splaying a hand over his knee in a repetitive motion— until a bit of his liquid jumps as a cold, torrential wash of ice water hits him clear in the back. It washes him clean, leaves him in a factory-default state.

_Oh._

He attempts to keep his voice steady as he asks, in German, the obvious question.

He gets a positive answer, but everything is mispronounced. Every word.

“Uh, did I say that right?” Utivich adds.

Those eyes plead so deep with the most radiant hopefulness.

Hans relents.

God, he’s cute. He’s fucking cute. Which he acknowledges as being more than slightly inappropriate, but there’s no shadowy voice in his head anymore telling him that it’s inherently wrong to think so- as there ought to be.

Hans doesn’t know what language to address him in anymore and ends up continuing in German- “Well, you’re better than Hermann.” He mutters this, face blank, eyes flitting left and right. Complete sentences become a far-off dream, obscured by shock, and he hopes Utivich is mastered in nonverbal communication.

“I’m gonna tell him you said that,” Utivich laughs.

Rather desperately, Hans tries to sort this out. He imagines a desk, and all of this being on it.

He’s much too old now for a juvenile romance. Thus, undoubtedly, _this,_ this _thing,_ is going to last for however long _it_ shall and no more than that. There’s a faint idea of where this is headed; he’s extremely aware of how the pit of his stomach hollows whenever Utivich makes direct eye contact, but that is where _it’s_ going to end. Chances are aligned that Utivich won’t want any more of _this_ by morning and he’ll avoid him adamantly until he’s inside of the truck, make those hurried looks and walk a little faster, rub his hands together through handcuffed wrists and immediately remember this discussion mere hours before. Feel guilty about it and turn back to Aldo as his IV drip of attention and care. Get uncomfortable at the memory of _this,_ and such it’d show on his face. They would part after crossing the lines, and never speak again.

But... he’s too lovely for that hypothetical. He’s too lovely for any sort of guilt as heavy as that, too pretty for backs of decrepit trucks, too pretty for hurried, awkward glances and too problematically appealing in more ways than visually for handcuffs ever again.

“Look at the time,” He says abruptly, not sure which language he’s speaking in. His wrist flies into his field of vision and he feigns surprise. “And as our dear Hermann escorted your Lieutenant, I shall now escort you to your quarters.”

“So soon?” But this isn’t any real retaliation; Utivich is stood in seconds, pushing in his chair and placing his glass adjacent to Hans’. Immediate, swift compliance always.

That face, downtrodden lower lip protruding in a pout and curved eyebrows combined with those words is enough to string Hans up by his ankles.

“What do you mean by that?”

“It just doesn’t feel like we’ve been here long.”

“Am I... imagining things, or are you warming up to me?”

This statement seems to come as a surprise. In response, Utivich looks at nothing for a while; Hans’ medals, the collar of his shirt, his jawline. He looks to the side then, lacing and unlacing his fingers.

Hans tilts his head, a serene touch to his voice. “Is there something I’m not being told here?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir.”

“You don’t?”

“Nope.”

Hans draws nearer by a single step.

“Then what are you hinting at?”

“That I like Nice Hans,” Utivich replies, once again in thickly mispronounced German.

And then he’s giggling again, and that is a blush. That is _definitely_ a blush beneath that fond gaze. Before doubts were inevitable, justifiable, but the flags are hoisted now and waving with a motion like water.

“Do you.”

“Yeah.”

“And what about regular Hans?”

“He’s schizo.”

He thinks he can suppress it in the form of an upturned mouth corner and nothing more, but Hans starts a long, full laugh. Aldo wasn’t wrong at all. Oh, indeed he is for letting this go on. He’s out of his mind.

“Would you like to tell Nice Hans where you learned German while he takes you to your room, then?”

“Sure.”

 _Puppy love,_ Hans thinks.

 _Puppy love,_ he thinks as he gestures for Utivich to walk in front of him and while he steers him through the musty scent of the hallway.

He doesn’t think anything as he’s relayed the story of Foreign Languages because he’s paying attention.

 _Puppy love,_ he thinks as he opens the door thick wooden door, smiling and motioning his counterpart to step inside. The air is somewhat cooler than it was in the reception area downstairs, despite the temperature outdoors being decidedly humid. Cool air nips at exposed bits of flesh, a narrow line of yellow light slides through the door from the hallway’s fading lightbulbs. It’s dark enough to trip, but light enough for one to make out where the other is.

Utivich hasn’t moved from the threshold, still looking up.

“So,” Hans hums.

“So?” Utivich echoes.

Hans’ eyes flit past him and into the room; he observes what little the external light will guide him to. It seems satisfactory; nothing too disheveled. The windows are closed and only burdened by a slight sheet of dust, just as is everything else. 

“Bedtime,” Hans simply says.

“Yeah.”

There’s a pause that’s too long, but somehow isn’t awkward. “Go on, then.”

“I feel like if I go to bed now I won’t wake up when we’ve got to go.”

“I see what you’re doing here, you know. And, admittedly, you’re very clever. As much as I would adore spending my entire night talking to you, I have to make sure your Lieutenant didn’t tear Hemann to ribbons. And if he did, I will need hours of solitude for paperwork and several more for mourning. And then I, myself, need my beauty rest.”

“Why do you need beauty sleep? You’re only twenty-five.”

“Well. If you really consider that my age, that would explain why you’re so quick to flirting with me.”

A tight little twitch jolts through Utivich’s arms, his cheeks sink in crimson. His eyes widen. “I’m not-” He starts this, but his voice falters hard and it turns into a light scoff. “Don't say that. I’m not.”

“Unfortunately.”

“Stop,” Utivich murmurs, but his tone isn’t deterring. He hits Hans in the arm, but there’s no brute force driving it and his smile is too big, too flustered for real hurt to have been the intent.

Hans stares with an appraising, fond look. That was... quite feminine.

“I’ve won. Hm, hm.”

“You didn’t win. You’re just saying stupid stuff.”

“Stupid stuff that makes your face red, no?”

“Stop!”

Again, Hans finds himself play-slapped, and Utivich looks up with another idyllic, golden smile. There is a marvelous glow in his eyes, cast and illuminated by the light. He would have easily and without a second thought put someone in their place for hitting him at all, but... this is cute. Adorable. It’s too cute. His entire being is sun-glowed.

“As punishment for hitting me, it is now deluxe bedtime. Which means you have five seconds to be in that room, and in that bed."

“One more thing.”

“Smith _son.”_

“I know, I... Listen, just... I want a serious, actual answer. Because this doesn’t make sense. Any sense. Why me? To get to Aldo? Some other thing?”

Hans leans forward to whisper. “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but it’s a divide-and-conquer strategy.”

Utivich’s eyebrows furrow deeply, but there’s inadequate participation from his other features for him to look angry. He’s beaming, still. “I’m serious. If it’s some kind of plan or something-”

“It’s not.”

“Really?”

“There was no information about you on any of my documents and I simply wanted to find out who you are. That is the most concisely I can put it. And you are a delightful individual.”

“Nothing... weird, nothing ulterior?”

“Not as far as the eyes can see. Now, I’ve answered your question. Bedtime.”

“Okay.” This time, Utivich actually enters the room, but he keeps his hand on the door and won’t break eye contact. “This is so weird. This is the weirdest thing ever.”

“Good Lord, I know. Why oh _why_ won’t Smithson go to his bed?”

“Cause I’m not tired.”

“No, it’s because you’re... Mm, how do you say that? What’s the colloquial-? Tipsy.”

“I mean, so are you.”

“Excuse you. I have a _very_ fortified alcohol tolerance. Can you say the same for yourself?”

“At least I’m not swaying.”

“I appear to be swaying because you’re swaying.”

“Are we both swaying, sir?”

“Most definitely.”

“Then we’re smashed, sir.”

“Mhm. And tomorrow morning will most _definitely_ throw us to the dogs. But for now, there’s a cure on that bed. Juuuust for you. Go on.”

“What was the alcohol content in the...?”

“Too much for an eighteen-year-old-”

“Stop!”

“-which, coincidentally, is the perfect reason for him to go to sleep. Now.”

“I know I’m not gonna sleep and I’m gonna end up doing handstands all night.”

“Shall I call Hermann to strap you down?”

“What, you can’t do it yourself?”

Hans blinks in surprise.

“You’re like Aldo. You have everyone do things for you.”

And then he can’t tell which of those two statements is more polemic.

Utivich looks similarly shocked, covering his mouth and looking down. “Oh, shit. Did I say that out loud?”

“Which part?” There’s a type of tension at play here and Hans is tangling around with it. Again, he takes a step inward, and he _really_ knows he should stop salting the wound. “The one about me tying you to a bed or that very uncharacteristic implied desire of insubordination to your Lieutenant?”

“Um... both?”

“Of course I could do it myself. I wrap a mean present, wouldn’t you know? I just had a feeling you wouldn’t be inclined to that type of treatment from me,” Hans says, placing his hand on top of Utivich’s right shoulder, exactly how he’d seen Aldo do it two hours before. Pressing onto it, he gives the area a light squeeze.

Hans tilts his head up and down, exceedingly slowly — assessing him, mapping the many facets of his mannerisms and posture. Documenting. His counterpart can’t help but fidget, he’s nervous as anything. He doesn’t know whether he should move or not and as a result just stands, both eyes on the ground. There’s dirt on his shoes now that wasn’t there this morning. A cuff by the sole, what looks like dried blood.

When Utivich looks back up, he’s still smiling regardless. There’s a clear stammer in his voice. “You’re making this weird. So fucking weird.”

A moment passes. Wordlessly, Hans’ hand descends the span of Utivich’s arm until their hands meet– and their fingers fold into one another. Slowly, slowly.

Hans takes a breath, and then his voice transforms into an asphalt-smooth, quiet monotone. “Does this make it weirder?”

Utivich meets his volume. “Yeah.”

“Weird how?”

“Weird as in I’m gonna have to look at you different now.”

“Hm?”

“You know how when you kinda hit it off with somebody, you have to look at them differently so they’ll know? Is that not a thing outside America, or-”

"Well, you tell me. Did we hit it off?”

This is the only time Utivich has been overtaken while speaking and didn’t mind it.

“I- I think we did.”

“So how are you going to look at me tomorrow? Could I have a sample?”

“I’ll... I mean, you’re gonna see tomorrow, right?”

Their fingers unlace as slowly as they’d originally laced, both of their hands hanging loosely afterward. Hans is no longer smiling, but his eyes are; they radiate a warmth Utivich has never seen since he left home.

“That’s agreeable.”

“So...”

Hans swallows, closes his eyes. “Goodnight.”

“Night, sir,” Utivich says.

With this, he peels the door closed at an extremely unhurried pace. It shuts with a heave, and Utivich waits for the telltale sound of footsteps- but he doesn’t hear any. He presses himself to the door then.

“Sleep good, sir.”

Several decades pass before there’s a response; “I hope you do the same.”

Then there’s the footsteps, trailing down the hall until they become nothing.

It feels as if the brunt of the wine all breached the dam holding it back at once when Utivich faceplants onto the bed, covering himself in blankets with a loose motion. His mind swims freely, thoughts of home, thoughts of music, arts. Some of Hans Landa.

And then...

An interval of drunken tenderness, followed by sleep, sleep, and sleep.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The drive begins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaha. I bet you thought you would never see from me again. You were half-right, for a moment there...  
> For those who kept checking in to see if I ever updated this: thank you. I am still working on this fic for you in particular. So many times I considered dropping this and leaving it as a one-shot but I was nabbed by the suspicion that out of the 7B people on this Earth at least ONE of you would have maintained interest... so... again, this is for you and you alone (and perhaps the others like you, but how high can my hopes be?)  
> The story continues! Sincerest hopes that my writing style is coherent and that you all enjoy it.

 

Buried in a swathe of blankets warm from his own body heat, Utivich wakes.

He wakes in the same bed he was ushered to, feeling wonderfully sun-dappled and pleasantly alive from the streams of light coming in from the window, and he thinks of nothing. He sits thoughtless, occupied with tracing the lines of thick divots in his sheets with a finger, and that is his entire world for one perfect moment devoid of warsore.

If he closes his eyes, he can pretend he’s _not_ in France and can fabricate an adequate story as to why he’s not home; family vacation, shoddy hotel. His own room. He can guide himself into an almost-meditative sense of reflectivity this way; disregard the past, disregard the future, and simply be here now.

He further reasons that the war truly is over, thinking of it as explanation for the unusual kindness displayed to him the night prior. It must have ended officially overnight, he rationalizes. When his ears stop ringing and he opens the window in the corner of his vision he’ll hear the bells ringing songs of freedom and see crowds upon crowds of people all celebrating the end of the second world war- but most importantly, he will be in New York City instead of who-knows-where France.

He runs his fingers over the hand that was held when he finds it; the thing doesn’t feel attached to his body, the sensation of fingers isn’t there and he’s left feeling down it’s respective arm until he feels that lukewarm mound of flesh. Raises it up, turns the palm back and forth as would an archaeologist scrutinizing a new find. It looks different today, each line professing a new meaning. The crescents have turned to a soft pink rather than their harsh red from before.

With an exclusion of that action, holding... hands, he realizes the affection wasn’t anything unusual, simply a spasm of niceness.

 _People can be nice, Smit,_ he tells himself. _It wasn’t major. You’re not special like that._

He makes a weak attempt at ignoring how he’s right, a weak attempt at quelling the negativity that blooms from that thought. That's how it goes; people forget their decencies and live in perversions of themselves once they they've lived in environments that are not theirs long enough.

_And then they become all schizo._

Utivich laughs to himself. He wonders if he could’ve done something similar.

He stares at the ceiling with his mouth agape. He imagines there’s a mobile up there, animals and stars circling in a roundabout, prisms of rainbow light dangling from the Heavens.

His head pleasantly ripples and dives, thoughts coming and going in a dull buzz that intensifies and lessens. But as he sits up, he recoils hard as the _headache_ he’s so often been moaned to about assaults him with a vengeance- he never drank so much as to experience one of his own. Abruptly, his vision comes alive with static. _There’s_ the warsore, back in full swing.

After falling back asleep for another fifteen minutes, he stretches, body arching into a curve that breaks when his back pops. Pale morning light shines in through battered blinds. When he can, he takes himself around with all the control over his legs he has left; navigating is difficult and he trips several times, but he eventually finds the blurry shape of the bathroom door and throws himself inside.

There’s a thought of actually taking a bath as Utivich scopes through the bathroom; its’ elaborate showerhead, mirror smashed in the middle, operational toilet and all. The lights thankfully still work. He rolls his shoulders as he peers a long glance at himself in the mirror, looking for any significant changes in his face. It’s the first time he’s seen it in anything but a puddle in months.

At first he likens the figure staring back at him in the reflection to a dying dog in a kaleidoscope, and to remedy this he smiles. His lips elevate eastward first, the west side lingering behind. He tries repetitively until his mouth stops twitching and his smile doesn’t look overly forced- there’s even a faint appearance of dimples that haven’t been there since his early adolescence-

Until this quiet Utopia is destroyed and the terror of wartime knocks. Someone is pounding on the door.

There’s no time to let his heart climb down from his throat. His reflexes snap back into place and all in one motion he’s there to answer.

He expects Hermann, admittedly, but his face loses all semblance of color when one of the guards from outside, tall and stony-faced, is at the door in his place. He hopes the way he flinched was not too telling, but it must have been judging by the way one of the guard’s eyebrows quirked.

Utivich is stared at with unfeeling eyes until he feels enough courage to the break eye contact, and... notices what the guard is holding- things. He’s holding so many things; toiletries, a towel, copious amounts of food. And to add the dot to the question mark, all is presented in a gift basket.

“What...”

“These are gifts from the Standartenführer,” the guard says in English, dryly.

After a bemused bit of staring Utivich doesn’t know what to take first, largely too stock-still from confusion. When he doesn’t move, the guard pushes past him and deposits everything onto the bed in a very orderly manner.

A hand is splayed in the direction of the basket. “You are going to eat and wash yourself. Then we will brief, then we will leave.”

Utivich nods dazedly, blinking more than he needs to. He looks through the guard, not so much at him. “Yessir?”

The guard seems pleased with that title. “The Standartenführer also insists that we treat you well. I would not dare to defy his orders, but I will implore you to deserve to be treated well. Do you understand?"

“Yeah, um... sir.” He figures he should probably say something else, and thus; “Wait. Tell... tell’m I said... thanks? Thanks... you? _Bitte_ tell him I said... that I said, um... _Vie- Vielen— D-_ um-”

“Are you hungover?”

“Is... am I...”

After a pause, “Quite.”

It is over as quickly as it commenced, the guard exiting as briskly as he had walked in. He shuts the door with a needless force, slamming it and making the basket jump. Though it only added to his migraine-induced shaking Utivich finds himself cogent enough to let it go with several deep breaths.

He stares at the basket, ears ringing.

Food still makes him tentative, so he rather resumes his shower when his limbs solidify from their gelatin-like state and he’s able to tell where the line of distinction between his head and his neck is. There’s a faint hope that Aldo, through a possibility of Hans’ extended kindness, had the opportunity to be as indulged as him as he breathes in the lavender and frankincense of the soap bar. It smells like holidays, smells like the warmth of a fireplace in sharp contrast to winter’s blues and grays.

His pants are entirely sodden to black from being waterlogged, pulled through mud, and bloodsoaked. Peeling them off is an effort and it feels more like removing a second skin, the parts that haven’t stuck slinking downward. A change of clothes would be the highest of blessings; his belt is rung out, his jacket reeks of a rustlike scent and never more than now has he missed the dress shirts of his youth.

By some miracle, the water is hot. It inclines up from a lukewarm state into nigh liquid magma, the desired temperature. No pouf, but war-made-scarce luxuries like that aren’t to be expected. He scrubs with his hands. As curls of brown, red, and some unexpected colors disappear into the drain he pictures days of dirt and months of strife being scrubbed from his body. He lets his mind flow, calming fully... he wells, lathering the rest of the darkness away.

The basket is excessive, the humbled side of him asserts; lotion, deodorant, a comb, toothpaste, and a toothbrush among other objects. He feels distinctly spoiled when he pulls out a tube of chapstick, scoffing over it in a happy kind of way. Gifts are gifts, he reminds himself as he gets to a haste of using all of them, then pocketing as much as he can hold. There’s a vat of hair gel, even, and then ‘thank you’ is the grandest understatement in the world. His hair had become sovereign without this stuff.

He still avoids the food, skirting it with the same hesitancy as a snake hovering around a fallen nest. That sense of too-good-to-be-true kicking in that Aldo often spiels about. They’re the farthest things from provisions he can imagine and it’s real, actual food, a meal, but after intense contemplation he can only force himself into three grapes, one bread roll, the entirety of the two bottles of water and then wonder if Hans aggrandizes like this for everybody who strikes his proper chords.

Utivich figures he’s more or less done.

Hovering around the door with wrapped food and sundries threatening to spill from his pockets, he pulls the door open to immediately be under the scrutiny of many too-tall guards, nigh all decorated. He feels particularly aware of himself and smaller than usual circumstances would provide.

There is more legitimacy to his nickname than he would have liked to have thought.

“Am I- I out too soon?”

“Not at all,” says a harsh tone. “You have a very long morning routine.”

Utivich grins sheepishly in that direction, but the expression isn’t returned.

 

***

Immediately he was in motion, heading an orderly line of soldiers that shepherded him downstairs.

He’s not seen Hans since last night. Part of him feels liberated by that fact, one harsh voice that personifies his long, long lineage of Jewish ancestry reminding himself that’s how he _should_ feel, liberated because he shouldn’t want anything to do with the man— while the other side is softer, liberated by the fact he’s in no proper shape to make the ‘look’ he promised. There’s still much to be desired in his smiles.

The headache decided to extend its stay from a foreseeable more thirty minutes to a grating course of several hours, the intensity of it no longer solely reliant on the soldiers’ proximity. He’s still decently shaken, a massive weight of awakened anxiety taking a place within his chest that he can’t pick apart with his own hands.

The truck has juddered him around so hard he is within arm’s reach of vomiting again. Laying down on the benches, Utivich is now slightly more mobile than his previous travels permitted and the sores on his wrists are steadily lessening in redness- but nothing much feels as if it’s changed. The aches are persistent and they linger with vengeance, the sores only swell. He’s able to see them in absence of the burlap sack, able to run fingers over them in the absence of the handcuffs.

He wasn’t handcuffed, locked up, nor sacked when being lead into the truck. He’s all the more freer than his counterpart and though neither or them have brought it up Utivich is patiently waiting for a dreaded conversation.Aldo is here, across from him. He’d asked to be left in his binds and keep the burlap for continuity purposes and Utivich complied with a nod unseen.

They’ve been stopped for what Aldo claims is twenty-three minutes based upon his incisive awareness of time measurement. The entire day was spent on the road. A series of voices rise and fall from outside, crickets resounding a polyphonic symphony of German. Utivich stares at the space between his fingers and tastes the bile in the back of his mouth a bit more attentively than usual.

“Private,” Aldo says.

“Yeah?”

“Can I ask you somethin’?”

The dry and numbing taste of bile doesn’t lessen. A small bolt of fear runs though Utivich’s arms— when Aldo has a question, he asks the question. He doesn’t _ask_ if he can ask the question.

“Sure.”

He’s up, pacing for a moment. He needs movement. The floor feels like it’s rocking beneath him, but he needs movement. He takes a few swings at the light, recoiling when it smacks back harder. Aldo hears his grunt and chuckles from a low point in his throat.

“See, I already...” Aldo trails off, another thing not much like him. “Look at me. Can’t talk bout this ‘less you’re looking at me.”

There’s times when Utivich wishes his first, second, and third nature wasn’t to immediately follow orders the second they’re received. It has even began to disorient, how swiftly his own input is overrode when there is a task to be completed. He figures that it is the thing war germinated within him. Hans’ quote comes to mind, and he feels his stomach grow increasingly more precarious at even the memory of that voice.

“...How do you know I’m not?”

“Cause you’re punching the lightbulb. Knock it off.”

There’s an inaudible _‘-and sit your ass down, too’_ type of order tacked to the end of that statement. Utivich yields to it.

“So...” Long sigh. “You know what I’m bout to say, right?”

His voice is- likely deliberately- placid and noninvasive; another unusual thing that isn’t characteristic of the Aldo Raine that Utivich’s grown fond of, appreciative of. It’s another unusual thing, like him speaking over his own Privates or asking to ask questions. Then there’s a morbid thought that makes Utivich stiffen at his roots; an accusing voice in his mind that tells him that by some slim, emaciated chance, there is the possibility his impression of his Lieutenant is more baseless than he would like to let himself think. His chest tightens and he makes a face, but there is a sense of underlying conviction.

“He didn’t... make me say anything.” This is uttered so weakly Utivich is astonished Aldo caught it.

“So you went and talked?”

“I didn’t talk. I mean... yeah, I said stuff, but what do you-? He asked questions, but they weren’t...”

“What?”

Utivich grimaces. “He asked me normal things. He asked about my favorite foods and what I like to do. At home. Music. What instruments I like.”

He’s always had a problem with that. Actively, though unintentionally, marking people up as being the way he’d like them to be, not the way they are in actuality. Remembering only the positive interactions with people, seldom if ever the negative. As a result, everyone is so much friendlier and amiable than they end up being behind the veil.

“He asked you what you like to _do?”_

Aldo may have been always speaking over him and he only stored the moments in which he didn’t.

And he might fundamentally be an unfeeling, war-hardened man.

“Yeah, that’s what."

“Listen. If he’s making you keep your mouth shut-”

“He’s not.”

If Aldo’s eyes could burn holes straight through his sack, they would be doing so now. _“If he’s making you keep your mouth shut,_ Private, then that’s a thing I’m gonna hafta know about now isn’t it?”

“You don’t think I’d tell you?”

“Private Smithson Utivich, am I a reasonable man?”

“Yeah.”

“Alright, then. I’ve never known you to be a liar, and I do know you to tell me everything ‘bout anything. Shit, you’re the finest snitch there’s ever been. But when I see this scumbag warming up to you and you tell me it’s fine, _that's_ when I get to my doubts. Tell me that ain’t reasonable.”

Utivich tries to say something but the words die on his lips, the result being a gentle mumble.

But the hand that was on his shoulder—

The back doors of the truck are abruptly flung open, and instead of the distinctive leers of the guards there are now a pair of soldiers. The harshness of the lightbulb throws thick slabs of illumination across them both, cutting them out of the black behind them.

For a moment the soldiers talk between themselves, glancing at them both but dominantly at Aldo. This persists until with the left soldier asks aloud in English, “Which one of you is the Lieutenant?”

It’s no time before Aldo has identified himself, promptly being unbound and stood. He gives Utivich a look that defies any kind of reconciliation when the sack is removed from his head.

“Easy, easy.” He rubs his wrists as he’s escorted out. “Where’s your Colonel at?”

“Where is he _at?_ You mean, where is he?”

“Glad to see you aced your beginner’s course. Same shit. Where’s he at.”

“...Would you like a word with him?”

“Sure would.”

“I will see to it. What about should I say?”

“My Private.”

“Is it a personal matter?”

“You ask this many questions on the reg?”

“...On the _reg?”_

Utivich starts picking at something at the back of his neck that doesn’t exist, head hung low. He’s given an odd look by the other soldier for this, but he’s stood carefully and moved out to where he can really digest his surrounds; a long, infinite-seeming stretch of dark road. The world looks monochromatic and the only thing to suggest it is not is the faint brightness cast by the headlights, the thin colors that don’t amount to much else than dark brown and muted grays.

Again, his feet _hurt,_ but he’s more wrapped in the argument taking place a few steps ahead— though it’s not as much an argument as it is a severe disparity of energies. Aldo is too much, the soldier is somewhere between being too subservient and not enough. Aldo says one thing dipped in deep-south slang, it’s thrown back at him and curved at the end in confusion, Aldo is enraged with the assumption he’s being mocked. If Utivich was in a better mood, he would be laughing.

The sight is familiar.

When they arrive at what Utivich can only conclude to be their destination, he balks. Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers.

A swarm of them posted outside, and from the way their faces all steel it’s certain him and Aldo are recognized. They become two heads progressing slowly through a sea of others until they’re at the outline of a stronghold-worthy door, one that seems to have been through recent toil.

The area is quieter on the inside, larger, reinforced walls and floors. Maybe it’s just the warmth present, but Utivich likens it to home. It’s distant now, but the muscle memory is there and it has him shrugging his shoulders in that way he used to get his backpack off by doing.

Hans’ personal guards make themselves present again, noticeably the one that came into Utivich’s room. He looks peculiarly benign, even waving.

“Our Standartenführer has determined it’s too great a risk to travel this late.”

Aldo’s auditory processing must just be faster than Utivich’s, because the word ‘determined’ hasn’t even sunk for the latter before he’s responded, sharp as ever. “Why’s that?”

“If you were an American-” the guard tilts his head low, makes an accusatory look- “and you saw German trucks meandering their way through the French countryside in a quiet, mouselike manner at a time like this, you may just think the... personnel would be of higher importance.”

“Huh. Awful thing to say boutcha ‘fewreh, don’t you think?”

“It is pronounced _Führer,_ Lieutenant.”

“Get fucked.”

“I only take orders from the Standartenführer, Lieutenant.” The guard waves at Utivich again as if he’d missed it the first time. Utivich responds with a micro-nod. “For murdering political leaders in cold blood, inconveniences are merely the price to pay.”

“Where’s he at?”

“Where is whom at? The Standartenführer or the Standarten.. _.feuwhrerr?_ Hmm?”

The guard waves at Utivich again, smiling rather boldly. It’s at this point whatever fuse Aldo has been running off the past few hours has finally burnt its way back to the dynamite, and a vein is visible on his forehead before he lets out a sharp breath, making that one face that Utivich can recognize faultlessly: the one Aldo makes when he’s sizing someone up. It’s mostly low eyebrows and a tight jaw but there’s something about it that loudly professes _‘I can, and ought to, beat the shit out of you’._

The guard is entirely removed, however, offering Utivich the room he’s been given with a spread hand. It’s less than a minute after they’ve both left that Aldo opts to follow, only to be stopped by an opposite set of footsteps sounding.

Fake yawn, faker stretch. “I heard my title. Butchered, given.”

Hans practically materializes out from nothingness, curving out of a well-concealed basement staircase and fixing Aldo with an admonishing glance. Without much volume he manages to project across the entirety of the bunker. His presence flips the room.

“Speak of the devil,” Aldo says.

Hans exchanges some words with his guards before turning back to Aldo, now looking decidedly bored as he steps inward. “Don’t wear it out.”

“You know you don't use half your idioms correctly, right?"

“I don’t use them. I say them, dear Aldo.” Hans blows a raspberry. “I’m tired. Please tell me this is important.”

“I knew a lot of smartasses like you in Uni. ‘Types of guys who always had to talk smart with people in order to, I dunno, flex whatever muscle of the day they were on. You’re all the same.”

“Universities in The Middle Of Nowhere, Tennessee? You’re flattering yourself again, Lieutenant,” Hans says, voice almost accusatory as he feels up and down for his cigarette case. “Now, where...”

“Can’t tell if that’s a compliment or an insult.”

“A compliment, obviously. You being a working-class American man who probably carried three separate careers at once all the while making whiskey in your bathtub, it must have been hard to keep up with tuition.”

“It was four careers, actually. That don’t count the bootleggin’.”

“Busy, busy, busy!”

The lighter goes _chk_.

Hans doesn’t think he’s ever actually finished a cigarette in his entire life. He gets close - very close - to the end, and something always diverts his attention. A telephone call, a summons, and he outs it and is on with his day. He’s so courteous as to, despite his grogginess, offer Aldo a cigarette. It’s declined. He does get to chewing some tobacco, however, and for at least five minutes they go about this business in silence. Hans can’t help but liken the moment to a ceasefire between warring powers, a temporary armistice between two nations to improve their international credibility- only to resume mutual destruction once the cameras are off.

“My rum was always better. Always comes out as one thing, but saying it’s rum makes it taste like rum. You put a rum label on it, it’s rum. You put a wine label on it, it’s wine.”

“Well, who am I to question the integrity of the artist."

“Shucks.”

“Do you want something?” Hans finally asks.

“What’re you doing with my Private, Landa?”

“Oh, _the morning,_ Lieutenant. That is a _morning_ question. Come now. This can’t wait? All of those men outside, you know, you woke them up.”

He is dog-tired although he doesn’t look like it. It’s moments like this when his body tries very desperately to remind him age and his health are gaining on him, and there’s a sudden surge of a desire to lay down. There’s nothing to lay down on. He begins pacing.

“Those boys are serving anyhow. They ought to’ve been awake six hours ago. You’re too easy on ‘em.”

“You are most certainly right and I most certainly am, but if I treat them like dogs then they’ll behave like them too. I’m... independently contracting them, if you will.”

“So you ripped ‘em out on short notice from wherever they were stationed and you're sayin' it’s official business.”

“Oh, stop,” Hans whines. _“Nooooooo._ Don’t do that. You’re not supposed to tell me my own plans. It makes me feel simpleminded.”

“’Don’t take a genius. What I wanna know is why in the hell you got so many of ‘em.”

“I had to capitalize. They haven’t heard about the Kino stunt quite yet, you see, and if I keep communications minimal and in select hands- Hermann, for example- I will essentially have a monopoly on... men, I suppose. So... yay for me! The more the merrier.”

Aldo chews rather obnoxiously, Hans finds. “John fuckin’ Rockefeller.”

“Hardly comparable, but thank you Lieutenant.”

“This is staggeringly dumb. You're aware of that?"

"Do elaborate, let's peer-review."

"You’re just gonna take all them to the states too, I bet? Them krauts got passports?”

“Heavens no. Most don’t even have legitimate birth certificates, asking for a _passport_ is like... me asking you for genuine liquor. Pure fantasy."

Aldo laughs for a while.

“I was actually planning on letting them go in groups, stationing them... who cares where, or maybe I’ll tell them when the time is right.”

“Yuuuuup. Starting to see why you’re not a strategist.”

Hans seems to mull over that for a moment, but opts to not respond.

“I saw fifty pairs of eyes out there. You are _some_ kind of dumbass. They ain't all gonna take that well."

“I’ve considered that outcome, and all I can say is that I am praying for otherwise. Now, why don’t you get some sleep and we can speak over brunch? Goodnight.”

“Oh, hell no.” Aldo quirks his mouth to make that condescending smile that’s become so characteristic of him. “Cause if I let you go you’re gonna pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about tomorrow.”

“Will I?”

“I spent my whole day in the back of a truck. Lemme move around and talk about shit, will you?”

“You had every opportunity to talk about shit with your Private, didn’t you?” When Aldo opens his mouth to Interject, Hans raises a finger, making a ‘ _uh-uh_ ’ sound; “Additionally, if you wanted to move around, you shouldn’t have been so belligerent on the way to the truck.”

“How much talking do you think he did?”

The cigarette is burning itself out void of Hans' involvement and his muscles feel tighter. “You’re in the back of a secluded truck with him and you have all the time to ask what you’d like. That couldn’t have been hard. What did he tell you, I wonder?”

“He says you had a modest n’ respectable conversation, I made an educated guess you were getting warm on him. Told him that. Looks like it’s the other way, but I was right ‘nough.”

“And your concern is that I am...”

“Getting into his head and spreading yourself around in there.”

“And you’re worried I’m doing that because...”

“You do that shit to everybody.”

“It’s incredible that you manage to be showier with your accusations than I am. Lord.” Hans takes another tentative drag from his cigarette, dawning on the fact he’s really not in the mood for it any longer. He at least needs to sit down, his feet are dragging and the circle he’s pacing in has been getting smaller bit by bit. There’s nothing to sit _on,_ why is there never anything to sit on?

Aldo makes a face that says he’s not satisfied with that.

He also seems to be losing patience, and they are mutual in that regard. Hans’ face tries hard to project that same baleful look of seriousness from the day before but the result is an unfocused and dreary glance, his eyes seeming to darken the longer Aldo stares at him. “Need I remind you again that the war is _over_ and I have no need to... what, smoke-and-mirror your Private? I have no reason to...” He makes a bizarre hand gesture here, both hands flailing- “do... something that will...”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t know, say something I don’t mean and something he doesn’t need to hear.”

“The hell does that even mean?”

“For the love of God, Aldo, it’s two in the morning. I’m not at optimal performance. You’re not tired at all?”

“Nows’bout the time I’d get around to making whiskey in my bathtub, Landa. ‘Night is just gettin’ started for me.”

Hans makes a strange sound in response to that, a long-stretched and miserable groan.

He blinks himself back into reality, rubs at his eyes when they water. He hates this particular bunker so. It seems at the end of every month he winds up here, usually prodded by accusatory letters or his own paranoia. If someone begins pointing fingers talking about insubordination to the Party, Hans has a stomach virus and needs to vanish off to a hospital that doesn’t exist. Then he is here for however many weeks until the heat dies down, sleeping on ratty mattresses or whatever his men can provide. He misses autonomy. He only truly has it during interrogations.

There’s an old blood stain on the floor that from the proper angle faintly resembles a face. He’s been looking at it for the broader half of this conversation.

“To soothe your ails I’m going to be completely forthcoming. You see, my measureless search for truth in my work has lead to me living in a state where I am particularly disconcerted by lies. I can’t explain it in a rational way because, well, hah, it’s irrational. I know it’s irrational. But it’s there. It’s deeply ingrained. Something inside of me blips on when I hear an obvious lie and from that point forward I’m then determined to find out the truth.”

“Huh.”

“Happy?”

“So he told you he’s twenty-one and you gave him a gift basket. Just for that one thing.”

“Essentially, yes. Positive reinforcement.”

“That’s a hell of a loose word, ‘essentially’. Bout as indefinite as answering a yes or no question with maybe.”

“Are you accusing me of lying, Enzo?”

“I’m accusing you of skirtin’ round the truth. Never called you a liar. I _think_ you’re a liar, sure, God knows I do, but I ain’t calling you one.”

When Hans starts running his hands through his hair and receding back to the stairs, Aldo merely follows.

“What else didja talk about, huh? I know for a fact you didn’t shake him for an hour to get his age. Woulda coughed that up in three minutes if you played your cards right.”

Harshly turning back, Hans stops him before he can come with; “Tell me. What does he know that I can find out?”

“More than I ever told him, probably. He’s smarter than you and I put together.”

Hans looks at his cigarette when he plucks it down from his lips. All that’s left of it is the filter. Despite the urge to throw it directly into one of Aldo’s eyes, he lets it drop at his side and forces a grin. “Then ask him again. He might change his answer if you ask differently.”

On the final step of the staircase it’s only when he knows he’s not being seen nor followed that he slumps down the wall, heaving a massive breath. The usual chest constrictions do their duty and he finds himself perusing the case again nevertheless.

He will try again, he figures. He wasn’t consistently smoking the last cigarette and therefore it did not count.

 

***

 

Utivich sleeps half on the floor, half upon a ratty pile of sheets that somehow end up feeling more homey than his own bed ever did. The bunker does have a few beds, mattresses even, but he felt a particular gravitation to the floor. The voice in his head cannot be bartered with, let alone refused.

When he dreams, the images are in a confusing sequence of back-and-forths, memories overlapping and being altered.

The only part of the entire dream that he remembers upon waking is entirely fictional; him, dressed formally in clothing that chafe but don’t swelter as he plays Chopin for an audience that consists of more people than he’s ever even seen before. It’s only when he gets too long a glance of the crowd that the magnitude of it begins to seem too real.

A thousands of pairs of unblinking eyes scrutinize but do not judge as he rises from his bench and moves to the front of the stage. It is silent, even his footsteps make no sound.

When he gazes out, a thousand pairs of unblinking eyes gaze back just as emptily.

_“Smit?”_

The voice comes from behind him. Fingers begin to lift the ends of his coattails, and it’s only when he turns to see that he’s dragged out of his dream, world spinning and diving as his vision erupts with static.

The first impression is that he cannot move, staring wide-eyed at the dreary figures now abruptly in the room that resemble his audience- and when he’s finally able to he hyperventilates his way out of the paralysis and forks himself upright hard.

Aldo is on the opposite side of the room doing push-ups, blissfully disconnected.

“Morning 'Vich."

“What time is it,” Utivich croaks tonelessly as he retches into a mound of sheets next to him.

“Just hit nine. You’re up right on time. C’mon.”

“Can...” He falters here quite hard, his voice riding upward at the end. “Just... can I just...”

“Huh?”

“Can I lay down for- can I take- lay down for a— please, for a minute?”

For Aldo, silence and a certain turn of his head is a positive answer. Utivich collapses bonelessly back into the rags and cloths, drifting in and out of sleep until his stomach stops its’ vicious turning.

After an hour of this he raises his arm the best he can, mumbles a weak sound that’s supposed to be Aldo’s name with only half the phonetics.

Aldo stands and helps him upright, providing a hand onto his shoulder to dock him once he gets a feel of how hard he’s quaking. That hand doesn’t do much to alleviate the terror but Utivich is nonetheless grateful and leans into him readily. They simply are for a moment, held in a tight hug while Aldo gives him a few awkward yet well-intentioned pats on the back of his head. Utivich laughs into his chest; he smells like sweat and testosterone. He leans into that so-desired closeness that wartime makes so sporadic; the touch of another, even though it’s someone he’s officially undecided towards.

“What instruments do you like?”

A strange question, coming from him. An odd question that has no real place in his mouth. The only things that come from are insults, commands and petty threats- something this humble must taste weird for him.

Utivich laughs dryly at the contradiction.

“Late to ask.”

“If I knew I’da asked. I’m not just gonna assume you play anything. You didn’t give me any hints.”

“Hints,” he echoes.

“I'm serious. What is it?”

“Piano,” and his voice is like a child’s.

“Alright. ’Play me something someday?”

“Okay.”

 

***

 

Aldo doesn’t seem happy to do so initially but he does wolf down what food Utivich carried and borrows his comb.

They’re both corralled back outdoors, taking the air for a moment while the trucks are filled with gasoline again.

It’s a fair day, one ripe for thinking. Utivich is lost in thought, mulling over his dreams and picturing himself in that stardusted suit, trying to wrap his head around what any of it meant to say. Dreams don’t make sense, them being merely... expressions of the mind, but they do have a tendency to speak of the time and circumstances when they occurred-

“Mr. Utivich!”

Maybe it’s because the voice came from behind him specifically that sends him a foot in the air. He mellows when it’s just Hermann, hands behind his back with a grin so wide it’s dopey.

“Hi, Hermann.”

 _“Hallo,_ Mr. Utivich. May I have a minute?”

“Sure, what?”

“When I was driving today I was in the town. And I stop at, urm... This... botanist. I see many flowers.” Utivich has a thought that Hermann at his core is just a happier Hans when he pulls out a baby pink rose, holding it with his left hand and doing a flourish with his right. “And I brought the most... the most... urm, the best one for you! Do you like it?”

“Oh, I- thanks. It’s nice. Thanks. Thank you.” Utivich’s face burns, reddening as he reaches out- just to have it be pulled away.

“No no no,” Hermann says. “You have a better place.”

He feels effeminate when the rose is slid into his hair by the stem, just by the curve of his ear. Hermann describes the process of dethorning it during his drive back in a very theatrical manner and from that alone it’s clear he’s likely never seen actual conflict in his life. He finishes by saying he has more flowers to distribute and Utivich watches him do so; Aldo takes the pair of roses he’s given with a confused look.

In time, the soldiers and guards begin to come together by the trucks almost in a huddle, and with closer scrutiny the figure they’re surrounding makes himself visible.

Perhaps if Utivich was a bit more vicarious, a spectator rather than a participant, this may have been incredibly amusing; to watch how Hans gets about being described as ‘modestly terrifying’- a quiet comment he’d overheard in limbo between the limo and the back of the van. He’s seen that, he thinks, but not the full extent of it. Although he isn’t bearing the weight of that stare, he still feels some primal instinct to _cower._ Flee and never return.

Juxtaposing the man now with the man who’d stood close and held his hand last night, it’s a Janus face situation. His face reads of a deep hostility as he gets to his verbal disciplining, eyebrows low and mouth austerely set in a look that professes with a deep timbre that he’s had to do this far too many times. In unison, everyone apologizes, and he seems thoroughly unmoved.

Whatever force pulls Utivich toward him is left unnamed and he’s by the fringe of the group in minutes.

When their eyes lock together, Utivich makes a face that he isn’t entirely in control of. He figures it to be a side-effect of his brain being decidedly slower this morning- his face flushes, he straightens out his back and makes a rather unwitting smile, all in spite of that cower instinct. Both sides of his mouth elevate in equal measure.

“And... riiiiight... there. Yes, there.” Suddenly no-one else matters and there's no qualms with pushing directly through them. Hans raises his hands and extends both pairs of his thumbs and indexes, then aligning them together to make a landscape-sized picture frame. He closes one eye, nears closer. “I believe I’m now seeing... the look I was promised. And it is worth every second of the time we spent apart.”

Utivich giggles too much to answer this.

Hans falls into a similar cadence, a peaceful air shrouding him then, an impressed and sated look crossing his features. “And there he is.” His voice is warm when he then says, with an acknowledging head tilt, “My little sleepyhead.”

Utivich can offer little back aside from a meek, breathless sounding “’Morn, sir.”

“Good morning. I must say, you’re looking quite polished today, now aren't you? Hmm-hmm. I do hope I was the first person to say so.”

“I’m only... Only look polished ‘cause I had a shower yesterday, it’s...”

“Stop. Stop right there. That’s gratuitous, _completely_ gratuitous. Shh. The dress that comes with detachable frills looks just as good without them, no? You look phenomenal.” Leaning in, he adds, “Further... I love the flower, as well. I know it's early, but if you’ll allow me to flirt it brings out your cheeks.”

“You, hah... you say that to any girl if she's wearing pink, right?” Utivich tries to bury his bashfulness beneath these words, tries to cover his face behind his hands.

“Fair observation, fair assumption. I suppose I need a larger point of reference than a mere flower. When this all clears up I’ll find you something pink.” Hans pulls away with a grin, then clapping and making a circular motion with his index finger. With a loud command, everyone gets to moving.

“I don’t wanna wear something pink. That’s... you know. That’s a girl color.”

“M _hm._ I can see the Chianti is still talking. Stop giving making this so easy. I need an ounce of difficulty.”

“What, to flirt?”

“Of course. You strolled up to me with a _rose_ in your hair. Is that not peak romance? How many times has this exact exchange occurred in novels for young women?”

“I guess so. How should I make it harder?”

With this, Hans turns his head to the side and smiles a contented little smile. “By wearing something pink,” he simply says, coat swishing as he climbs into the passenger’s seat.

Utivich doesn’t get it until an hour has passed of the ride.

When he does get it, he has to turn his gasp into a cough so Aldo won’t ask questions.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rip. The ending was me realizing "OH I didn't include any actual hans/smit in this hans/smit fic up till this point" so I indulged you all a little... Just a warning that it's going to be a little expositiony ahead. 
> 
> Thank you for reading and I dearly hope you enjoyed this one. ^^  
> Next chapter will be done soon. If you liked this, let me know in the comments and kudos are always appreciated! Have a wonderful evening.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lengthy discourse in the French countryside. Strudels and more intrigue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies that it took me so long to post this, formatting it for ao3 is time-consuming and if I'm to be honest half of my upload time is barred by my reluctance to do that... but I'm glad for those of you who remembered that I'm writing this and were waiting on me, I love you so much.
> 
> Uuhhhhh just one tiny thing before we get started today: I feel that it’s important to say, in awareness of recent events, that I do not support Nazis nor their ideology in any capacity. To be truthful, the only reason I’m really writing about this movie is for practice for my /actual/ stuff. If you’re still reading this (or if you even read this pre-word, thank you for doing so by the way), remember not to buy into any Nazi content uncritically /or at all/ if you can help it. 
> 
> You may be wondering now, ‘why are you still writing this then?’ and... for you! Maybe I'm making someone out there happy or inspiring them with this somehow. I hope so.

Roads, some half-paved, some made of dirt or sand of unknown origin. There is a curving cream-colored hill or two that reminds him of LaPadite. There is the occasional van that, abandoned, is inexplicably burning with high-reaching spindles of smoke. Hans sits puzzled over these, tries to ignore them and focus on other things.  
  
Planes continue to soar overhead and slice the sky open with that awful, screaming sound they tend to make. This migraine is still making its’ rounds.  
  
It’s a new, budding thing with all too many permutations.  
Hans doesn’t have very high expectations; coincidentally, he has none, mostly just feeling around this uncharted new slice of opportunity without a map. He thinks he has made no real commitments and it’s true, to an extent; there is a stain but no scar left over from the night of their meeting. He does act peculiarly when drunk, is his excuse. Half of the time when he teases it’s to make the other person uncomfortable or keep them corralled in their place. There have been many, and there will be more. He’s flirted with Aldo several times if he’s going to adhere strictly to his own definition of the word.  
  
What makes Smithson different is not very much. He has the sleek black hair and lavender blue eyes of his childhood dream girlfriend, he has an adaptable nature and is a pliant _meek-shall-inherit-the-earth_ person, but the train stops there when the coal that is Chianti runs out.  
  
He sits with Smithson in the moving pictures of his mind– they are sat a small couch, gaudy red pattern on it and all, viewing a mortared fireplace that has enough kindling but is not ablaze. Hans is holding a lit match. He can light the couch, or the fireplace. He’s not made a decision yet and Smithson doesn’t sway him in any particular direction, rather sitting with his hands folded and taking up as minimal space as possible.  
  
...He’ll find someone his age. He’s too mature for a juvenile romance, he doesn’t yearn for the stomach butterflies and irresponsibility of juvenile romanticism. Hans will find someone his own age overseas, he will rebuild himself, and like all things do when not maintained, the tether between the two of them will wear itself thin and wear itself out.  
  
_Make it harder._ Hans scoffs into his hand at the naivety, the innocence. Another burning truck vanishes in the rearview mirror.  
  
He likes the reactions to his more controversial prods, they’re cute– but they don’t need to go beyond that. They do not, and they will not. But he does wonder how far he can bend before a nigh-inevitable break will occur.  
  
The drive is quiet, sky turned overcast with a gentle drizzle and the occasional bump the uneven road. It curves and curves and sometimes narrows and sometimes broadens, the forest is thick. There is a quietness to the land that is unnerving- Hermann does not seem to feel this, but a silent anxiety is pulling Hans down.  
  
Hermann makes for a fine driver, what with his tendency to burst into song or tell childhood stories and aggrandized miscellaneous tales. Today, however, he has been quiet for all of the several hours they’ve been out until he inadvertently drags Hans out of his half-nap. “Standartenführer?”  
  
He doesn’t open his eyes. “Yes, Hermann.”  
  
“May I ask you a question?”  
  
“No, not now.”  
  
“How horrid is my English?”  
  
It’s like Hans can hear the frown in the words themselves. How uncharacteristic the statement itself was is suspect enough,  but Hermann never asks questions if they’re denied. He’s the only person not to.  
  
Interesting indeed, Hans takes a moment to think. “Horrid... wouldn’t be my word. You’re working very hard on it, and you are...  gazing out at the road of progress.”  
  
“But I’m not walking down it?”  
  
“Not down. Up, Hermann. Up, up. Always up. Progress is a ladder. Upwards always.”  
  
Long pause. “Am I coherent? Do my sentences make sense when I-? It’s- I worry I am incoherent.”  
  
“You aren’t incoherent.”  
  
“Really?”  
  
“Without doubt. Now, I’m trying to slee-”  
  
“I wish I was you at times, Standartenführer.” This is said in an odd tone. “I wish I was able to... speak as fluidly as you do. In both English and German. You’re very good with words. In, well, in a way that I am not. And likely could not be. Will you forgive me for being abrupt?”  
  
“...What. What is it. What happened. What’s happened? I know something happened now.”  
  
“I merely find myself appreciating more and more the... the many worlds, of you, Standartenführer. I understand how you rose to your title.”  
  
“Hermann, do you want something?”  
  
“No, Standartenführer.”  
  
“You want something.”  
  
“I want nothing, Standartenführer.”  
  
A silence does pass, the bridge of Hans’ hat keeps getting into his eyeline. The third time this happens,  Hermann fixes it for him.    
  
“If this- oh, I see. I know what this is about. I hope you know that if I had more time at my disposal I would still be teaching you. Really, I would be. You’ve yet to show me disinterest, you _are_ studious and- well, most concepts glue to you easily. Quick, say clothing.”  
  
Hermann attempts to repeat the term in English but instead says ‘coat’.  “Did I say it correctly, Standartenführer?”  
  
Hans blinks and lights a cigarette. “Well. Luckily, that isn’t a word that is commonly... said. Not in our circumstances, anyhow.”  
  
This seems to distress him a disproportionate amount, whining things of his own inadequacy and inability to do anything than turn knobs and repeat orders. Hans listens to his rant wordlessly, offering nothing and phasing in and out of true attentiveness until the last stretch of words.  
  
“-and there _was_ a reason I said that, but since you’ve- as you’ve, well, dropped interest, I-”  
  
“Pardon?”  
  
“Nothing, Standartenführer.”  
  
“You have this tendency of becoming incommunicable when you _clearly_ have something to say. It’s a bad habit.”  
  
Things are progressing in their usual indignant way. Hans relaxes, rubs at his eyes and sinks into his seat. Yes, this is a seat, but sparsely can he find comfort in it. How perfect it would be to lay down, his body asserts, welled by a different appendage of the same kind of tension he was feeling outside that hotel room, inside of that bunker. It is dressed differently but the terrain is identical.  
  
“The _worlds_ of me,” he mocks, not fully consciously. “You mean by that?”  
  
“I’d swear that you remember nothing. Nothing at all.”  
  
“I remember everything very clearly, Hermann.”  
  
“Wrong.”  
  
“Wrong? Excuse me? _Wrong?”_  
  
“I’m convinced you go out of your way to ignore other people’s-” The breath Hermann takes is somewhere between despondent and irritated. “A _hem.”_  
  
“No, no. Finish your thought. By all means, don’t let me interrupt you.”  
  
“I have absolutely nothing to say.”  
  
“Wrong.”  
  
Hermann says nothing, so Hans fills the silence:  
  
“Could I ask about why speaking English suddenly matters to you so much? It didn’t a-” He hits the dashboard with his knee, the result is a hard wince through closed lips. “It didn’t a week ago. Where did that come from? Where- oh, no. Oh, no. You didn’t _actually_ give him some kibble, did you?”  
  
“You’re not taking me seriously.”  
  
“I am very serious when I say types like him throw bones. They don’t catch them. Don’t bother.”  
  
Hermann does not respond. There’s a far-off thought that the conversation is still left open like a wound, one saying that conclusion was hardly conclusive when he sees the way Hermann’s gripping the wheel.  
  
“Wait. Dear God, you- no. No. You don’t like him, do you?”  
  
“I can’t recall saying so, Standartenführer.”  
  
“No, but– Hermann, you _realize-”_  
  
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”  
  
“No. No. If you want me to be serious about this, then we can be serious about this. Look, I’ll even sit properly. That means I’m being serious, you see? Look, look.” Hans buttons his coat very pointedly, then completely half-turning in his seat to face Hermann. _“Raine._ _Aldo_ Raine. _Aldo, Raine._ What’s come over you?”  
  
“You like Mr. Utivich, Standartenführer.”  
  
Hans is seized by silence for a moment, lines on his forehead burrowing deep as he wrests with that entire sentence.  
  
“Ah. And I know you do because you didn’t say no just then. Hmm? I now have proof. That’s evidence, Standartenführer. Hmm? Is it not? Evidence, that word you use so often.”  
  
“I don’t _like_ him,” Hans says, his voice betraying him in how insincere the words end up sounding. “You and... you and your images, Hermann. Your imagination is too undisciplined, you’re- haven’t I warned you about your tendency of- fabricating things?-”  
  
“I should have warned Mr. Utivich when I had the chance today,” Hermann says, voice tempered by an unsteady laugh. “I would love to see you attempt to maintain another relationship in this state you’re in. That will go absolutely swimmingly, I can see it now. With someone half your age, no less-”  
  
Hans forgets where he is for a moment.  
  
Hans forgets where he is for a moment, and he smashes Hermann’s head against his window with a tight fist- the truck swerves to a hard left as this happens. It stops when they hit a bank in the side of the road, the mud only trapping the wheels deeper into it.  
There’s no sense of time and Hans isn’t himself sure of how many punches he throws, but when the impulse’s fuse has burned out his knuckles are stained crimson and Hermann’s arms are ineffectually shielding his head.  
  
Hermann strings a daisy chain’s worth of apologies in both languages and Hans faintly remembers the last time this happened. It presents itself as a mild accusatory voice in the back of his mind. A stern ‘Hans,’ said in the voice of an admonishing teacher or elder.  
  
“Why don’t you go sit with that dog of yours?”  
  
Hermann nods twenty times more than is necessary, both hands fiddling with the door handle until he stumbles out into the rain on swaying legs.  
  
“Yes. Yes, Standartenführer. I’m sor-”  
  
Hans pulls the door closed before he can hear the rest.

***

 

Aldo has questions and a few witty comments in store over Hermann’s state of being; wine-red temple and bluing cheek, but he has a fair idea on the who the catalyst was.  
He gets all too close a look at him when Hermann walks up beside him, legs tucked in like he’s deathly afraid of taking up too much space; thus, he sits with his hands folded, taking up as minimal space as possible.  
  
With his key, he unlocks Aldo’s handcuffs and strips him of the chains binding his ankles.  
  
“Thanks.”  
  
Hermann sits slowly on the bench and scoots on it a few times as if adjusting to make a fundamentally uncomfortable thing comfortable. “Oh, this is excitement! The true experience of a prisoner!”  
  
Such happy words come strange from a bottom lip beat until plump.  
  
“One way to look at it.”  
  
“How are you feeling, Mr. Raine?”  
  
“How’m _I_ feeling?”  
  
“Yes, yes.”  
  
“...Just fine. I, uh. ‘Heard my name up there a couple times,” Aldo says after some time, voice nowhere near as impassive as he would have liked. “Couldn’t sort through the Deutsch, but.”  
  
Pause. “The Standartenführer is... very active in his debating, Mr. Raine,” Hermann says, avoiding his eyes. “That is all.”  
  
“I’ve heard and now I guess I’ve seen. Don’t wanna know, do I?”  
  
“No, _nichts._ It was nothing.”  
  
Regardless of how strange it feels to do so, they watch Utivich as he sleeps for a moment; his forehead pressed into the bench and his arms dangling over the floor, swinging with every bump in the road.  
  
“The Standartenführer likes him.”  
  
“Yeeeep.”  
  
“Oh, you... you know?”  
  
“Wasn’t much of a secret, now was it.”  
  
“I suppose not. Will you do something?”  
  
“Mmm. I oughta and I don’t think there’s much room for a choice. Got any advice for me?”  
  
Hermann’s face sinks in a familiar way. “Any...?”  
  
“Advice.  You know, uh... tips. Advice means tips. You got any tips for me?”  
  
“Oh, thank you! Tips... I see, I see. There is no need for adviis, however- I will tell Mr. Utivich for you, Mr. Raine.”  
  
“You really like my name, don’t ya?”  
  
Hermann’s lips become a straight line here and his fingers tussle together much more insistently. With his face toward the ceiling and cheeks beginning to draw hue, he shrugs.  
  
“I have been told you... I have a reference, and... were...” He tries to begin, voice wavering tellingly as he cranks his head away again under the force of Aldo’s stare. He takes a long, deep swallow through a dry throat; “were you in the... industry of bootlegging? Um... bootlegging industry.”  
  
“Not much of an industry now is it,” Aldo grunts. “Kinda the wrong word there. What about it.”  
  
“Would you like to tell me about it, Mr. Raine?”  
  
“Alright, stop. You gotta quit calling me that. Stop. I got a name and you know it, so use it.”  
  
“I only use titles, Mr. Raine. It is more polite.”  
  
“Not repeating myself.”  
  
“I apologize. Would Lieutenant be better?”  
  
“Sure. Whatever.”  
  
Long pause. “What is that?”  
  
“What’s what?”  
  
“I feel... something, what is difficult to say- do you feel it, too? But it may be... the powerful desire I have... to call you as Lieutenant Raine! A title that properly covers the scope of your command!”  
  
“’Fuck is your deal?”  
  
Hermann stops. His face flushes in deep salmon here; “Aha. No, no. Not my deal. That is not- that is not my deal. No no no no no. Most certainly _not_ my deal. But I do- I do like it, however. Your name?”  
  
“This kind of thing is why he was beating the absolute shit outta you, huh.”  
  
“Lieutenant Raine just has such a pleasant sounding ring to it!”  
  
“I _told_ you to— you know this ain’t cute, right? You want a backhand or what?”  
  
“Would... Is it... Is it rude to say I do not think that you would do that? How could you ever when you’re so nice and... erm. What is that word. Democratic!”  
  
“Demo _cratic?”_  
  
“Yes!”  
  
Following a pause, Aldo shakes his head in disbelief, chest heaving with something that’s the greatest ancestor of a genuine laugh. “They make y’all different over here. What the fuck.”  
  
“I can only agree with that when I visit America.” Hermann says this with his voice wandering as though he’s sifting through a catalog of various daydreams. “How is it there? I have only heard stories.”  
  
“Exactly what all y’all heard it is. Miles n’ miles of rye. Couple hicks, couple millionaires, same block. Everyone sells bathtub liquor to make a living and _we all talk like this.”_ Aldo puts so much accent emphasis on his last few words that Hermann, who can’t sift a single word out of it, merely blinks with an unfazed smile. “And, I guess, we’re democratic. Kind of the shtick but it mostly ain’t something you really think about cause you’re busy with your rye.”  
  
“Rye?”  
  
“Wheat.”  
  
“Ahh. Wheat is a part of alcohol, yes? A- a contribe-youtor? Is that what it is for? The bathtub liquor?”  
  
“...Sure.”  
  
“If I were to ask, would you teach me how to make it?”  
  
“Nope. And I say that cause it’s real professional work. It’s like working in law, y’know. Gotta go to school for a decade or so.”  
  
“I am honored to be in the same place of an old master, then!”  
  
“Bout as much a delicacy as rat poison, but sure.”  
  
“May I ask you a question, Professional Delicacy Creator Lieutenant Raine?”  
  
“No. However, you can ask Professional Delicacy Creator _Aldo_ a question so you ought to do that ‘stead. Why don’tcha.”  
  
“I see no men named Aldo here, there is only the Lieutenant and all of his democratic...ality. Yes, that!”  
  
A long, belated sigh. “Shoot.”  
  
“Pew pew,” Hermann says, making finger guns. “Oh! The police are coming! Ah! A life of crime!”  
  
“You’re out here picking flowers and working radios. Not exactly hard-boiled action to me, but sure. Figures.”  
  
“You may be surprised, Lieutenant Raine. May I have your permission to say something pro...vokativ? Provoh-? How do you say this word?”  
  
“It’s pro _vo_ cative. Not provo-cative. Makes the ‘ah’ sound.”  
  
“Pro _vac_ ative. Pro... _vak_ ative. Provacati- no. Pro _vo_ cative? Pro _vo_ cative, yes?”  
  
“There y’go. Permission granted, go head n’ say your thing.”  
  
“Thank you very much, Lieutenant Raine! Provocative... provocative. Well, I want to say...” Here, Hermann points at his badges, flourishing his hand over them. “I was a criminal long before I shot you.”  
  
And then he’s laughing, laughing in a way that’s markedly bold but still tapped by a strong underlying paranoia- an audible form of a hurried look in all directions, one for listening ears.  
  
Aldo needs a minute to let that sink into his head. He looks at the badges, nothing he can understand nor recognize, really, but there’s not very many of them. They catch the light. In time, he looks up with measuring eyes and tilts his head.  
  
“Really.”  
  
“Yes, Lieutenant Raine.”  
  
“You know what y’all are doing, right?”  
  
“Oh, yes. We are not democratic at all. I think there is a chance I would not been... ahem, would not have been, so... shocked, had someone told me what we do and I had not learnt on my own. Do you want to know how I learnt? The radio. And chatty men, such as the Standartenführer. When he is drunk, he will talk and talk. Talk, talk, talk...” He makes a feeble hand gesture. “And then he will talk some more.”  
  
“Sober man’s thoughts, I guess. Is that my tip?”  
  
Hermann takes an exceptionally long time to carve a response for that. In the time he spends thinking- and Aldo gives him generous time- he finds a soft focus aligned with the exact center of Utivich’s face. A blank, calm stare. A history with Hans races through his mind: the stark discoloration of his face the last time he provoked him, and the time before that, and the time before that, and the time before that.  
  
“There is no need for tips. Let me talk to him. I will handle it.”  
  
“So he can beat your ass again, right? Got it.”  
  
“...With all of my respect, of course, I do think you pestered him enough. I heard your conversation last night.”  
  
“Oh, I’m pestering him now?”  
  
“He- the- well, he— um. How about-? I have a, um, a proposal. If you let me do it, I will get you your knife back.”  
  
Aldo sighs, sinks down some. “Thought it was still in Paris.”  
  
“Not in Paris, it was confis- confiscate- confis-state— taken. It was taken. You see, the Standartenführer wanted to keep it, so he... Well. I know where he keeps it. Will you let me help you? Please?”  
  
“You swear he’s got it?”  
  
“On all that I love and cherish, Lieutenant Raine.”  
  
Hermann figures this new phenomenon- _spit-shaking,_ as Aldo refers to it- is just as American as the delicacy of bathtub liquor.

 

***

  
The long, drawn-out, neck-constricting drive comes to a neat and tidy conclusion, and by this time Hans is so winded he doesn’t bother to wait for his guards nor the soldiers. He takes a solitary walk down the rest of the road to the doors, and admires. A long glance skyward. Such a small and amiable town that make a set of four floors look like a towering sixty. The rumble of ironclad wheels must have been the loudest thing this place has heard in a while aside from... distant, distant howlitzers perhaps.  
  
There’s sweat collecting at his nape and he’s remarkably cold underneath all of this clothing,but it’s a hot-cold. He’s also furious, for some reason. A mania chews at his ankles and keeps him kneeling.  
  
The receptionist is underwhelmed by his face, but moments later taken aback by his uniform- she jumps a foot back. When she’s caught her breath, her hands are raised. She’s looking down, the approximate area where his gun holster is. Hans scoffs over that as he forgot the item was capable of existing outside of Berlin, period; nevertheless, with a calm disposition and calculated steps forward he explains the situation in a long band of lies which she somehow perceives as truth.  
  
She pushes the guest book towards him in a way similar to how a fearful child might skid a bowl across the floor to a rabid dog.  
  
_Someone_ here is taking meticulous care of the wallpaper, but the silence is gnawing. “Are you the only one working tonight?” he asks, “Should I even be here? I’m afraid I may have stumbled onto the property of a _very_ wealthy man by mistake,” he jokes. She responds with a mumble about how surprisingly competent his French is. This barely passes over the radar of ‘insult’.  
  
And indeed, it could pass as being one big unattended house with a single maid abandoned in the scramble during the owners' leave─ Hans checks this thought. No-one this far out would know yet, now would they? France, this big wad of land; for all the driving they’ve done they might be hours away from the Alps. A terrifying thought. He tries to think of other things, he’s never been well with geography.  
  
The reception room is spacious and yellow, it’s very yellow. Obnoxiously yellow. In this light, Hans looks blond. He catches a quick leer at himself in a wall mirror and he looks like a demon, the leather of his coat obfuscating all other colors in this grating absolute black. The insignia on his hat must be the equivalent of horns in this case, he figures.  
  
It’s easy to be mad at Hermann, it’s easy to be mad at... _people,_ really. He signs the register books with his real name and falsifies the other forty or so, probably including those of his colleagues’ twice or maybe three times. This goes unnoticed.  
  
It’s strange, he’s at odds with the way he looks, especially in this one particular outfit— his face becomes foreign like he’s never seen it before, and the smile he’d been aiming at the young receptionist fades back into the ether. Then his features sink, his eyebrows low, and he’s glaring at himself. Into himself. Interrogating himself. He looks around in there, in his own head. Inexplicably grows even angrier with what findings he’s presented with and parts ways with the receptionist to sit in a very far corner of the room where the light cannot exactly touch him, just throw a dull slither of illumination onto one leg.  
  
“A lot of... people, monsieur,” she says after she’s digested the amount of names. “And I can hardly read this handwriting.”  
  
“Surely not a problem?”  
  
“I need to... make a call.” As if pulled back into the room behind the desk by a cane, she’s immediately gone.  
  
It takes a long time for his men to come in on their own, and the faces are a mix of despondent and irritated. The guard he’d sent to Utivich’s room is especially provoked. There’s a vein popped on his forehead, that’s new.  
  
“I take it you needed some time away, Standartenführer?”  
  
“Yes, Rosenbluth.”  
  
That’s the end of it- for Hans, anyhow. He doesn’t allow himself to be interrogated, ever, and eventually Rosenbluth drops it and walks off. People are asking Hermann things across the room, probably invasive things about his face. When has Hermann ever responded well to intrusion, even that which he accepts? He won’t say anything. If he does... the solutions Hans constructs for that scenario ring evilly.  
  
He watches Utivich, for a while. He hasn’t noticed Hans yet and he walks with his hands folded in front of him, stringing around in what eventually patterns out to be circle after circle in this quite lost looking way. He has a decorum that’s beseeming of a young bachelor; not quite brainless, but missing some... needed faculties of manhood. Hans is sure he’s heard his father say that exact same thing about him, once.  
  
Hans is not interested in a juvenile romance, but he sets his bait. He watches Aldo and Hermann vanish up the stairs just as they did down the hallway- a much less adversarial conversation this time, from the face of it- and once they are gone, Hans bangs something with his hand. Whatever it was, it makes a strong sound and it gets the attention of several soldiers, but there’s one key figure of the mass that he prioritizes.  
  
When Utivich paces over Hans wants to say in that motherly tone, _‘Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to approach legs extended from the darkness? Don’t you know that’s a key feature of brothels?’_  
  
Still too angry to form a coherent sentence, Hans just gestures.  
  
He’s buttoned his coat and taken off his hat. He’s not sure if it’s for his own sake or for Utivich’s.  
  
“Oh, that’s-! It’s you! I was wondering where you were, I... You vanished on me.”  
  
“I sometimes tend to be mysterious. I thought you should know.”  
  
When Utivich sits down, Hans has his arms wrenched around his chest and is pulling him into a sharp embrace upon his lap so roughly he might be leaving bruises. It softens into a cuddle and Utivich’s face does pink, but Hans is still... so angry. So uncharacteristically angry. About something. Something lacking in both face and name.  
  
Utivich is very warm, and while that tends to the cold Hans is feeling it only engorges the heat and worsens it.  
  
“Smith... _sonnnnnnn.”_  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“Why don’t we take a walk together? Hmm?”  
  
“You wanna go on a walk with me?” Utivich replies in a voice that is greatly evasive, almost coy. He hides his face by burrowing it into Hans’ shoulder.  
  
The impulse is to say, _‘is that not what I asked?’,_ but he does not let himself say it. “Indeed.”  
  
“That sounds good. Right now?”  
  
“When would be better?”  
  
When Utivich adjusts, his leg swings oblique over Hans’ knee- the one he’d smashed against the dashboard. A long, muted wince. This goes unseen and unheard. Grimacing and shifting ceaselessly, he prods the flower still tucked into the sleek, straight black hair. He plucks the petals.  
  
And it strikes him abruptly here, as hard and bright as a shining beacon from the darkest crevices of the mind, just exactly _what_ was in his thoughts moments before it began to rain and Hermann opened his errant, errant mouth. It strikes him back to that previous world, what he was pondering: this. This, exactly. This bachelor on his knee.  
  
First _captive,_ then... _bachelor._ Bachelor still flies sharp, but it’s a markedly softer word, less tempered by fire and more by observation. There is a downward slant of intensity present here. Hans wonders what the next noun might be.  
  
He asks himself again if this is reality or not when he’s taking Utivich’s hand in his and leading him out of the wide wood and glass back doors of the hotel, escorting him in the way one likely would a woman. Hands raised unnecessarily high, other behind his back, stepping out of the door before him and waiting.  
The air is somewhat cooler than it was inside, despite the temperature outdoors being decidedly hot and humid with midnight breeze. Warm air nips at exposed bits of flesh, narrow lines of light come from the windows above them and that which bounces off the streetlamps. It’s dark enough to trip, but light enough for one to make out where the other is.  
  
Hans expects something to happen, vaguely, though he doesn’t know what. The horizon gawks back at him, it has no name. The anger has melted into confusion, and while one side of him is on a drunken-feeling autopilot the other is admiring how well Smithson can keep up a pace. Hans walks briskly until he remembers the point of this exercise- so is his mind’s word for this- and slows down; without complaint or word Smithson eases into the new speed and settles. He has a good gait for walking with someone else, hands held- then elbows linked, which he was apprehensive to instigate until it was reciprocated.  
  
A very needed good mood sprouts from these observations, and as though the clock has reversed by two decades Hans applies a spring to his step, bouncing down the way on his heels- Utivich seems amused and tries to skip alongside him.  
  
“So. A sweeper once, a pianist then, a metallurgist in the future tense─ oh, wipe that look off your face. It’s honest work. But a metallurgist in the future tense, yes? Tell me, Smithson. What can’t you do?”  
  
“What can’t _I_ do? You’re a full-time chef and a ballerina, sir. Shoulda told me.”  
  
“Ballerin _o,_ you little devil, you. I’m beginning to rub off on you, aren’t I? Anyway- you musn’t tell someone all of your hobbies on the first date, you see. That’s truly just bad conduct-” Hans stops abruptly. When Utivich turns to look, he’s pulled off the sidewalk and into the center of the cobbled road, held there with one hand on the small of his back and one hand holding his. “A _ha._ Now, that’s better. Will you handle the music for my recital? I’ll pay the price of a full commission.”  
  
Utivich has no idea how to waltz, and his feet are dragging in the circles Hans is ushering him into. His glee is infectious, though, and Utivich's confusion doesn't last long. “You didn’t give me time to write a composition yet-”  
  
“Step with me, Smithson. Keep the time. Look, watch me. One, two. One, two.”  
  
“The reason I told you so much is cause you asked so much— if that was a bad date it’s not my fault- uh, like this?”  
  
“Wonderful, you’re starting to get it- not a _bad_ date, bad wouldn’t be my adjective. Now, if your definition of a _bad_ date is numbed jaws, swaying and tasteless flirting, I’ve not taken you on enough dates. So-” Hans spins him in a circle before transitioning back to their formation in one seamless motion; “-allow me to change your opinion. Shall we drink again tonight? Are you in the mood?”  
  
“If we’re drunk we can’t dance, can we?”  
  
“I hear intoxication aids the form, actually- have you ever done a tango?”  
  
The tango is the farthest thing from an actual tango conceivable. Utivich is laughing too hard to keep his form, and Hans is too focused upon that to keep his. It soon becomes freeform, a fuse of spins and dips and Utivich’s inclining body.  
  
Once done, they simultaneously curtsy before bellowing with laughter.  
  
Of course, there is an option of room catering and while they could have a bottle of wine asked upstairs, Hans knows himself in the realm of self-control enough to talk himself away from that possibility. The hotel’s dining room suffices once he’s directed all of the soldiers and guards to either go to sleep or not be nuisances- loudly, but out of his date’s earshot.  
  
_The next noun,_ Hans thinks. He’s impressed by the wine selection and fawns over the tall bottle of shining, polished Bordeaux that bridges the gap the table creates between their two chairs. Beneath the shroud of dim lighting and two table candles, words are strummed and toyed with.  
  
“How’s this different from Chianti?”  
  
“Oh, I’ve heard many, many things about the seamy underbelly of French wine etiquette. I forgot to ask her, but we may be in for a little surprise. Either this will be of a humble ten percent- still too much for an eighteen year old, wouldn’t you say?-” By a hand reaching across the table, Hans is play slapped and told defiantly to knock it off. He’s starting to love that. _“-or,_ on the other hand, this could surprise us and be just north of thirteen, perhaps even... fourteen, percent? With contents this high it’s no wonder their political decisions are so... thoroughly, thoroughly backward.”  
  
Utivich’s palm is holding his cheek and holding up his head in the same way the trees hold up the skies. “Okay,” he says, gently, stomach fluttering, more than content with letting Hans steer the conversation. He likes this and his smile is fond. His eyes flicker between the maroon liquid and Hans, for the bottle intrigues and repels; he’s visibly open with the interest of someone considering a deal where the reward is just bigger than the risk. The risk is mostly undefined, yet nevertheless painstakingly real. “I’m up for it if you’re up for it.”  
  
“Then,” _-pop-_   “I am the same.”  
  
After the cheers, they take a mutual drink.  
  
Hans slams his glass down. “Stop. You’ve not eaten.”  
  
Food is introduced to the table and perhaps it’s just the scrutiny, but Utivich eats. A glass of water is added but it’s allowed to go untouched. They finish one bottle over some light talk and are given another.  
  
“─I do promise. I do so solemnly promise to you that I will accrue for you...” a long yawn- “your spinach, and just as well as that, your bread. Spinach and bread. A baffling combination on paper- but I suppose I’ll just have to try some for myself. The greatest expression of contemporary romance possible, _oder?_ Yes, of course. Now... my dear. Don’t get up yet, we’re not done. No, this simply would not be complete without a worthy desert.”  
  
As no soul on Earth can proportion a strudel as properly as he can to maximize the enjoyment of it, Hans divvies it up and, with a small chunk on the end of his fork, reaches across the table.  
  
Utivich laughs into his third- or perhaps fourth?- glass when he sees this, beginning to slouch and slur his words in a way that would be imperceptible to anyone else. “Aw, no. This is like... something from those stupid movies.”  
  
Hans glides over the opportunity to make a joke about that and pretends to not have seen it. “You’ll like this. Open up.”  
  
“Open up, huh?”  
  
He barely staves back a cackle. “Oh, now I _know_ you’ve drank too much. So this is what goes through that lovely little head of yours. Imagine if your mother heard you say that- if I’m to steal one of her prized recipes, I can’t withhold that from her, now can I?”  
  
“If you rat me out I’m not gonna play for your recital, so. How’s that?”  
  
“Oh?”  
  
“And you’ll be tangoing all alone, too.”  
  
Being surrounded by passive yesmen has numbed Hans to the idea of backtalk- even Hermann’s outburst today still has him somewhat shaken. From Utivich, the contrast makes it exciting.  
  
“Stop paraphrasing my worst nightmares. Now, open up.”  
  
Utivich snorts.  
  
“This is funny to you, hm? Am I going to have to open you up myself?”  
  
“What, you wanna?”  
  
Hand to his chest and jaw on the floor, Hans feigns shock. “Not at the _table,_ Smithson. Lord forbid the both of us.”  
  
Hardly appropriate at all how his eyes half-lidded in sync with the part of his lips, but not unwanted. With one hand Hans submerges himself into his fifth- or perhaps sixth, his alcohol tolerance is fortified but his pacing is not- glass and with his other he presses the fork forward. The fork goes farther than it needs to. There’s resistance when he pulls it out. It’s coated in a thin layer of saliva. Hans stares, and then finishes his wine.  
  
“So yeah, just... not at the table?”  
  
Hans doesn’t answer this immediately, instead just pushing more strudel pieces his way. He decides to continue this until there’s no more of the strudel left for him.  
  
Eventually, his inability to live with silence wins the moment, and he says “Why do you ask?”  
  
“Uh, you know.” The shyness returns in full force. “Cause.”  
  
“Because what?”  
  
“...You know. You’re the detective. You got to know things like that.”  
  
Is that shade of red even possible on a human face? Hans supposes it is now. “Do you know that you’re nowhere near as chaste as I’d presumed? Nowhere near.”  
  
“Is that bad?”  
  
_No,_ he thinks. For the last bite, Utivich leans forward and closes his eyes, mouth open. Hans decides to forgo the fork and pushes it between his lips using his fingers manually, gradually. The disappointment that he could have none of the strudel is crushed by another disappointment.  
  
“Hmm.”  
  
“That was really good.” Utivich sinks back into his chair, noticeably breathless.  
  
“So you think I’m twenty-five again.”  
  
“Just for a little while.” He pours the next pair of glasses himself with such confidence it’s a surprise he’s not been doing it for his entire life.  
  
After a long nod and a moment of thought, Hans runs his tongue over the fork.  


***

  
  
A quick moment in his room allowed him time to remove his coat, shrink down to the essentials of dress; his button-up, his pants. The genuine moment where he asked himself whether or not a belt is at all necessary, and instead of seeing this thought train through to the next station folding neatly everything for appearance’s sake. When this is all finished he breathes in numbers to reign himself in, then opening the door. He apologizes for his delay and beckons Utivich inside.  
  
Hans is growing a suspicion that he only functions properly as a human being when he’s not wearing his uniform, and it is a suspicion that grows like a tumor. Trusting his _date,_ he allows himself to not stand up pole-straight for the first time in some seventeen years and he doesn’t tuck his shirt in on impulse. Low-effort, he tells himself, but if he’s carried all of this out correctly his mind may just forgive him enough to spare him the rod of criticism.  
  
Eyelids drooping tiredly in a way that makes him look almost sad, Utivich looks at Hans with what must be admiration. His hands stay knit together until they pick up their usual hand-holding ritual, at which point he feels around Hans’ palm until he finds a place that fits right. He gives a resolute squeeze there, not quite making direct eye contact, but looking.  
  
Utivich flirts indirectly by how he comments on Hans’ hair being a mess and tries to fix it himself. Hans, who mostly never allows himself to be touched, flirts directly by letting him. They talk, he follows the motions with his eyes, he hums. He wouldn’t say his hair is as immaculate as is his liking, but he can see at least. The thought counts most, he figures- or however that idiom is said.  
  
Rosy-cheeked as always, happy. Utivich stutters, fatigued, drunk, tender. “Can I have, like... can I have a, a hug─ like- a hug? Hug me? Will’yh?”  
  
Thus, they hug. It’s a warm little thing that even boasts a squeeze, but a careful one, a prudish one although Hans isn’t much for prudish things. Everything needs to be bold, heavy, full of sound, dramatic, theatrical, flaring. But he has this little hug and he enjoys it, tries not to read too deeply into the way the ridges in his back protrude.  
  
It’s a good hug, though Utivich is too debauched to comment what he’s thinking in a way that wouldn’t be a long unwieldy stream of consciousness. His mother hugged him this way. She hugged him this way when he was leaving. This exact way. Hand to neck, slow palming, head to bosom. There were more tears and more hysterical wailing, but this is how it’d happened.  
  
It’s enough to eliminate the dull buzz of his stomach churning and growling below, enough to revive that warmth of home and the feeling of being seen and noted by another within his mind soul and heart all alike. Contrasting sharply with the happiness is a fierce aching of his throat, a knot that’s deeply embedded toughly as he strains to vocalize over as he looks abashedly up at Hans.  
  
“Nice,” Utivich struggles to say. He’s thinking sentences, paragraphs, novels, epics, but that’s all he can get out. “This, this is. Nice. Thanks.”  
  
“Of course.”  
  
The elephant in the room is that he’s is not wearing his overjacket right now. Under it is a ribbed tank top, and Hans’ perusing self cannot help but observe. Lissome, wiry in stature, littered in moles. Details, details, details.  
  
Hans is mulling over the fact that Utivich _would_ look nice in pink. There’s a image to accompany the thought now that didn’t exist at the time of him saying it. But again, he is inclined away from the notion of a juvenile romance- he didn’t need Hermann’s chastisement to arrive at this conclusion and he’s sincerely not interested in a relationship that would take the sort of turn his subconscious is showing interest in anyway, not whatsoever— but the image is nice, so he allows it to lie with him in his tidy imagination-bed. Pretends he can reach out and touch it and feel the satin- the material of what mind-generated-Smithson is wearing is satin now, it wasn’t before; as the image continues to develop the more intricate the details become. It unfurls like the petals of a rose.  
  
They unravel. When Hans reclines on the bed, Utivich crawls over him like a blanket and transitions to a state of semiawakeness in seconds. Watching him traverse the tribulations of intoxication is somehow voyeuristic- it reminds Hans of his own ignorant period when he’d first turned the same age, but where he was louder and took hours before he would become mute and contemplative Utivich keeps his head down and mumbles. This is preferable, really, as it reeks of his character.  
  
“What was that at the table? Hm?”  
  
“Noth... nothing.”  
  
“You weren’t trying to... beguile me? Of course not, yes?”  
  
“Pssh, I... I could...’nt...”  
  
“Is your secret ability your aptness of... seducing men?”  
  
“Maaaaybe.”  
  
“I _see._ What phase is this of your Lieutenant’s divide and conquer strategy-” Hans cannot finish this sentence before a sweep of drunken giggling, ensuing for some five minutes, breaks out between them.  
  
“You’re just easy to seduce, maybe.”  
  
“And to think I ordered you a desert and taught you a dance for this. You do know that you had the entire thing, yes? I couldn’t and didn’t have any of the strudel- that I should remind you, that I ordered for the both of us.”  
  
“Cause you gave me it.”  
  
“Oh. Well. So you suppose... suppose... I suppose I did, didn’t I?”  
  
Utivich starts giggling again.  
  
“What’s so funny?”  
  
“You’re smashed again.”  
  
“Wrong. How can I be swaying when I’m lying down?”  
  
“No. You’re smashed. Saying things all...”  
  
“I’ve never drunk- dr— no. The word. What is the word. The word for drink in the past tense. The verb, past, tense.”  
  
“Yeah, that’s drunk.”  
  
“I’m not drunk, Smithson. Stop disrespecting me. I ordered you a strudel.”  
  
“No, yeah, _drunk._ Word. Drunk. Wait. Drank?”  
  
“I’ll never... do anything, ever again, if you continue to talk to me in this way.”  
  
“Never?”  
  
“Abso _lutely_ not. Never. You’ve hurt my feelings.”  
  
Utivich, speaking into Hans’ collarbone, is almost entirely unintelligible: “But we gotta do another date sometime. We kinda... we messed this one up. Fucked it. Two bottles.”  
  
“Yes, but two bottles shared evenly.”  
  
“Why’d... why’d, you lick my fork?”  
  
“It was, actually," Hans pauses here as the entirety of English leaves his brain. "...my fork.”  
  
“It was in my mouth. Mom says germs, you get germs from, like...”  
  
“I have no germs and nor have I ever.”  
  
“You sure?”  
  
“Yes.” Hans stares at the wall, trying to sort through his language catalogs for the word he wants. “Vitamins.”  
  
“Vitamins!” Utivich exclaims, abruptly excited.  
  
“Yes, vitamins. Indeed, I do. I use those things.”  
  
“If I don’t take vitamins... are you... you gonna get sick caus’a me?”  
  
“Of course not, darling, no. See, am I sick right now? No, I’m perfectly... healthy. Healthy and full of vitality, as much as ever.”  
  
_“Gesund!”_  
  
“Yes, yes. You could use some strengthening on subtext, I was... If you look closely, you’ll see I had the intent to say one very spe...cific thing with that fork. My fork.”  
  
“‘M kinda an idiot, so I didn’t get it.”  
  
“Don’t lie. You get it. You do. In fact, I’m beginning to suspect that you aren’t- truly as naive as you would like for me to believe. I’m right, yes?”  
  
A single hand and from there a single finger travels upward to prod, accusingly, at Utivich’s lips. When the understanding that he’s allowed to do this finally makes manifest over Hans’ impeded faculties, he continues at a slower pace, an admiring stroke of the lower one.  
  
“A little.”  
  
“I knew you were beguiling me.”  
  
“Cause I’m- I want you to do something.”  
  
“Something such as open you up, apparently.”  
  
“You- you wanna?”  
  
Pause. A flash in an already platinum pan, a flash of _the pink_ seems to ghost across Utivich’s body.  
  
With a hardly-coordinated yet still functional motion, Hans takes grasp of both of Utivich’s shoulders and tugs him down to the left, then sidling on top of him.  
  
“I’ve wanted to do _something_ since that first... glass of fucking Chianti.” An unsteady exhale whisks down the slope of Utivich’s neck and when Hans finds himself having uninhibited access there, he trails kisses around accordingly.  “So it works for both of us. Hmm? And- you say _something,_ such a vague word, isn’t it?”  
  
The grogginess keeps Utivich pliant. With arms made of cotton he attempts to reach out, upward, anywhere he can find a grasp and settles for Hans’ nape. “Yeah vague, but ‘s vague cause I want you to fill in the blanks, um, you know?—”  
  
“Suggesting that _you_ are the _something_ I should-”  
  
“Uh-huh-”  
  
Utivich has never kissed someone of the same gender before now. Girls have kissed him, but he never kissed them. He wasn’t expecting this to feel so overwhelming; the expectation was that it may be some weak ember that would fizz out before it could even approach inferno potential. This, however, is at that end point and a bit further. Twice he almost pulls away just to give himself time to process it all before the excitement burns him up inside- and he is burning up, come to think of it. Hans is very warm. His hands aren’t, but his chest is solid, warm, present and real. So is he, so is his mouth.  
  
On the opposite side of the experience, Hans feels he’s at too late a point in his life to be having _another_ first kiss, feeling as though he’s stolen the vestal chastity of these lips by introducing them to the dozens of forgotten faces they’ve seen  over the course of his decades. The second kiss feels realer and melts into the third. Utivich sighs into the fourth, and that’s either a _nervousness_ thing or a _stimulated_ thing- whichever it is hasn’t revealed itself yet.  
  
There’s a lot of things to think about as they embrace for an unspecified amount of time, Utivich rubbing circles into his shoulders, messing with the ridges where his bones jut underneath his skin when he can reach them. Likely the most pressing of all things is the worry of how this will play out in the morning; the fact that with even a minute less than his usual allotment of sleep, Hans can’t much speak at all, and the fact he’s now some five hours devoid.  
  
“You’re about to fall asleep, aren’t you?” Hans says this spanned out over several short breaks for air.  
  
“I don’t want to,” Utivich says in a _voice._  
  
Hans likes that voice very much.  
  
He cannot remember if he stayed awake to indulge in more of it. In one second his hands were ghosting over his belt in tremendous anticipation, and in the next the familiar _nothingness_ of a overdrunken sleep came for its’ dues.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for pulling the rug out from under you with that ending there, ~_~. I will make it worth your while I promise.  
> I hope this wasn't too flowery, I'm bouncing between several different styles right now and even if it seems loose now I'm going to pull all this together veeery tightly in the next few chapters. I tried to have a lot of Hans/Utivich in this chapter to make up for my drought.  
> Thank you very much for your comments and kudos, your thoughts and your critiques help me to improve my writing!   
> (PS I'm trying to keep the word count down, I'm so sorry for this chapter's word count oh my goodness)


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now I'd firstly like to apologize for taking so long to post this. My process for writing is really 10% creating new material and 90% editing which leads to a circular just sink of endless formatting and changing and so on... I'm also going to try to shorten my scenes because this has officially clocked in as the longest chapter thus far. I'm going to try to see to it that no chapter ever exceeds 10,000 words but I'm not going to make any definite promises for sure, please understand.
> 
> And a little postscript of stuff:  
> • I hope it makes sense how I vary between the names Smithson and Utivich, I tried in the last scene to solidify the 'system' so to speak that I use. It'll stop being less inconsistent ahead, trust me.  
> • I also started mentioning other characters from the movie in the past tense- that's where the backstory tag comes in! Exciting no?  
> • I tried to make the supporting characters be out of the way because myself personally I'm not really big for such characters in fics, but I named Rosenbluth for example to eliminate the use of constant epithets. 'So said The Guard™' would be a headache for me to write and also most likely one for you to read  
> • I really do just make up words sometimes. Imperceptibly, though!
> 
> Why all this? I don't even know. I'm taking this on as if it's my own independent writing. Forrrrr you all!

He’s unsure of when he falls asleep, but he is sure of when he wakes- in the same nook, light struggling to enter from under the thick yellow velvet curtains and a still softly sleeping Smithson, who is breathing like he has the weight of an entire man on his chest. Which he does, Hans realizes, promptly sidling off him to the empty half of the bed.  
  
Thin bolts of light stream in from the shut drapes, but the rest of the room is brown and black. The nightstand lamp works as well now as it did at night- despite it being what Hans _assumes_ to be the morning. The way a hangover can so effortlessly throttle him back and forth has not seen an ounce of change. Expecting his trademark swing to the left upon standing, Hans uses the excess of the motion to enter the bathroom and try to find himself in the ripples of this otherwise functional mirror- a long, solemn glance at proves he looks as though he’d been hit by a steam train and slowly ground to atoms while underneath it.  
  
Fortified is his alcohol tolerance. The _mirror_ is rippling, not him, he asserts as he takes another hard lateral left in one moment of shoddy foot coordination.  
He smells like sex— sweat, lust and perhaps some agitation fused with passion— though he knows nothing happened. Like a scientist splaying an elaborate maze for a rodent he always tries to leave himself little hints for the next morning after a blackout; his hat is not replacing the lampshade and his boots are not tilted towards the bed in a very specific way. There are intermittent memories of dancing and a new, vague taste sits on his tongue, but he has little else to work off. The mental desk is clear and seems as though it’s been polished by different hands for once. He waxes it manually as he lathers in the shower, forehead pressed against the tiles as he lets the water run its’ course.  
  
On goes the tall lamp, and the room is illuminated in cream; the sheets and their cottony divots, the color balance in the room’s yellow, white, light-blue hybrid. The furniture matches the color palette obligingly and the amount of pillows is nonsensical, many fell onto the floor in last night’s scuffle. All things considered the room is not big, but space is allocated to provide the most breathing room. _There are hotels in Paris less sophisticated than this,_ he muses to himself.  
  
He tries to stretch, pulls something, stops trying to stretch. For a painful half hour he thinks of everything still stranded in his Berlin apartment, imagines looters and his perfectly handcrafted artisan desk- the predecessor, the one the mental desk takes after- being woodchipped by a rogue projectile. Planes keep rumbling the ceiling, he hears their whirring and is disconcerted as he pulls his undershirt over his head, for the walls are shaken so hard a painting of a yellow flower hits the floor with a thud, its glass shattering.  
  
The new affair of picking all of the shards up is tedious- again, another thing that ought to be Rosenbluth’s job or perhaps even Hermann’s, but there is some priority to be at the head of things in his own life mostly to impress. It comes around every _time a new subject of affection blows through the door,_ but this thought is checked. _Subject of affection_ flies sharper and colder than bachelor or even captive.  
  
Either the planes or the picture frame seem to have woken Utivich, the now-unruly hair on his head starting to shift when he rolls to and fro, stopping when he’s lying with his back to the ceiling. He stirs, and the glass is not a priority any longer. Hans cannot help himself from running fingers down his neck; likely a ticklish spot, as after laughing into the pillow he reaches behind him.  
  
“Where...” This comes out in the same sluggish stutter of the night prior, only now it is quieter. “Where’re you?”  
  
The fingers are lifted from his nape, and they travel to the low curve of his back. “Nowhere.”  
  
The mental desk stocks itself entirely differently at record speed, and it’s oddly stocked at that. There is the current physical state of affairs- slightly disheveled, not in full uniform, as unleaderly as physically conceivable; an event direct from his nightmares; yet, there is one thing that has more of his attention piqued now. Utivich-  
  
—“Morn,” he says, like it’s nothing—  
  
-who is laying supine in the mountain of pillows he’s pulled downward, hair and face wreaked with sleep. Utivich, who, as Hans can now see by the help of the ample lighting, is covered in kiss bruises down to his collarbones, all colored and flagrant. Problem material.  
  
“...Good morning.”  
  
It’s an hour. About an hour, or so; Utivich spends a quiet hour sobering up with the help of a cold shower and a couple of exercises that he’s clearly been shirking on, Hans spends the same hour miserably sat in one of the room chairs slumped around his waist, varying his attention between the tidy amount of glass he’d moved to the top of the dresser and the way Smithson’s shoulders bob during his fumbling pushups. He counts aloud. Or... is saying something. What language is that? Hans doesn’t recognize it and attributes this to the hangover.  
  
And his mind flits nervously around a claustrophobic room as he takes distracted puffs from his pipe; a needless object, superficial and hell to clean and stock, but there’s something about it.  
He clears his throat, loosens the first few buttons in the row of his dress shirt and slacks further because he supposes he’s found someone he can actually practice his leisure around. He’s testing the waters. Bridget? Dead? No. Elsewhere. Perfect desk and immaculate office? Being kept by somebody, some _Hermann Zwei_ or perhaps _Hermann Zweiundsiebzig_ out there, not currently up in flames or obliterated by precise British aim. House in Nantucket? Secured and waiting for groundwork, a beckoning garden in its backyard. The issue is simply getting there. Pipe? Surprisingly tasteful today though he’s hardly in the mood for it. Smithson? Courted.  
  
He imagines asking, midway through another hamfisted yet pleasurable waltz, _‘Smithson, would you like to court with me?’_ and the word ‘court’ being lost in translation between the last few centuries and now. He pictures the blush spreading to his ears when the word is swapped for the simple ‘date’, and that’s cute. That’s very cute. Hans rewinds the little film he’s created and watches it over and over.  
  
There is a quick knocking on the door, a succession of several with just enough pause between them all.  
From the other side of the door comes a feminine voice in French: “Good morning. The time is...” the telltale pause of someone checking a watch, or in her case an entire grandfather clock that she’s hauling around, making an awful dragging sound upon the thick carpet, “Seven thirty on the mark. Breakfast is in the works. Up, up, up.” This same dialogue and sounds, with the give-or-take addition of a minute or two, continues down the hall.  
  
“Thank you,” Hans calls back.  
  
After taking a long break, facedown on the carpet— Hans stares blearily, but the hangover thinks _“Oh God, is he dead?”—_ Smithson resumes but this time counting in English. “-for-forty, forty-one, forty-two, forty- forty, um, three, forty-four, forty-five, forty– _ugh,_ forty-s- si- six—”  
  
...Much too early to date, though, is it not? Too early to _waltz,_ even, if he’s going to look toward the teachings of his all too conservative upbringing for guidance.  
  
Utivich is fit to collapse upon completion, a grunted ‘fifty-five’.  
  
“Fifty-six,” says Hans, clapping.  
  
“So.” Utivich breaks the silence after a long span of panting. The panting is intriguing. Though his eyes are closed, Hans quirks an eyebrow at the sound. “’Sup wh’you?”  
  
“I’m well.” Every part of his inflection screams _I am not well._ Aware of this, Utivich draws nearer, begins to prod and ask, but Hans does not let himself be interrogated ever.  
  
Until, again like it’s nothing at all, those blue eyes mellow and say things no words ever could. “You sure?”  
  
Hans measures him for ten heartbeats before extending his hand just slightly, crooking his index again- once, twice. Thus, Smithson hangs wordlessly suspended for a moment before nodding and closing the gap between them. Inches away he looks down with those blue, blue eyes. A lake full of clear, translucent water. An untouched span of sky, cloudless. A trove of bluebells swinging in the wind.  
  
To change the subject, he says, “I’m going to use an awful word.”  
  
“Oh yeah?”  
  
“I am exceedingly... flumocksed, that you’re this awake right now. There. That is my awful word.”  
  
For this, Hans gets a tiny portion of one of those golden laughs again. “You mean flummoxed?”  
  
“Flummoxed?”  
  
“Yeah, that’s how you say it. People don’t say it that much.”  
  
“Mmm. I see. Always keeping me on my toes, thank you. But really now, how were you able to do that many? Wonderful, I’m exceedingly proud, but what gives? What gives, yes? That’s the expression, isn’t it?”  
  
“Pssh, where’re you getting these?”  
  
Delicately tiptoeing around mentioning movies in any aspect, he instead says, “Various forms of media, my... jetsetting acquaintances.”  
  
“Tell em that nobody says that stuff these days. But I’ll take it from you cause you’re special.”  
  
“Oh! Glorious, would you look at that. I’ve become special. See, Smithson, the blessings are just raining down on me lately. What stage is this in the standard American criterion of relationships?”  
  
“It’s the part after the looks start, so... it’s kinda like a ladder...”  
  
“A _ladder._ They’re tiered?”  
  
“You could look at it like that, yeah. You kinda... you can do more stuff with someone the higher you go with them. It’s romantic. It’s real romantic.” This isn’t mumbled, but it isn’t much louder than a whisper.  
  
“I’ll give you a pen and paper and I’ll have you draw me a diagram so that I’ll know exactly where we are at all times. Hmm? May I have your hand?”  
  
Smithson’s palm is soft. He rocks their hands together as if they together formed a cradle. “Heh, uh... oh, also, I’m awake, ‘cause, um... I dunno. Why’s it harder to sleep on a bed than on the floor sometimes, do you think?”  
  
“Conditioning, which is why I’m making an effort to see to it that we have suitable rooms more often than we don’t. But I was just as much of an insomniac when I was your age, don’t worry.” With his last words, Hans hears Hermann’s voice in the back of his head, reproaching, admonishing, and his free hand unconsciously balls into a fist. He takes a breath. “Tell me something, Smithson.”  
  
“I hate Swiss cheese?”  
  
The fist loosens as Hans takes a moment to process the linguistics there.  
  
“Hate the holes, y’know. Cause, um... when I was a kid, this one guy at school told me I’d eat all the air in the holes instead of the cheese, and I’d pop like a balloon one day? So I’ve never had any.” As if he’s afraid to tell a lie, this last sentence is hastily added, “But I might’ve had it once, maybe. I don’t know, maybe.”  
  
What an interesting voice. Hans envisages him in a fresh-pressed suit, spangled with the glow of a hundred soft spotlights as he takes center stage, introducing the night’s symphonic lineup with this stuttery tone. It sounds... in some removed and extremely miniscule way, almost like Aldo’s. Is this an appropriate thought? Hans checks it for sensibility. There’s a ghost of a twang that nearly parallels the Lieutenant’s absolute... vocal slalom, but perhaps it’s just the word choice...  
  
He blinks himself out of the chair that is situated before the mental desk. Then, sober and mature,  he returns to the matter at hand with a clear of his  throat.  “I feel now would be the best time to explain this to you.”  
  
“What’s going on?”  
  
“I made a mistake,” Hans says simply, every word drawn out so slowly due to his grimace it feels as though he is hearing them inside-out.  
  
“Bad-bad?”  
  
“Bad-bad.”  
  
“Okay...” Utivich takes a pause to think about it. “Well, what’s it got to do with? What’d you do? You’re okay, right?”  
  
“Yes, yes, very. You see, the matter is that-”  
  
“Just– hey, look, don’t worry about it. Cause you can tell me. ‘Kay? I’m good with secrets. I mean, if it’s a secret. Know why? I forget them before I can tell someone else. Not that I would, but you know. So don’t worry. I can try to help.”  
  
...Oh, how cute. It’s most certainly just his word choice. Hans is hearing things...  
  
Hans is, also, about to clear all the air by outlining his perspective last night in graphic detail when Smithsonis by his side, bending over by the loveseat until he’s at the optimal height to kiss his jaw; done quickly, nervous, unsure.  
  
Smithson pulls away smiling, yet with a look that says he’s not willing to brave this particular expanse of no-man’s-land if Hans won’t be by his side in crossing it.  
  
_What did I do,_ you ask. He wants to, he doesn’t know, just push Smithson's chin upward and say something cliche like _‘this’_ and then repeat what he did last night. Show how much he adores that splotchy little mole where the deepest stains are and kiss it again. He gets too close to doing so; his hand ends up tilting his face upward which does make his cheeks red like fire, but that’s all. In the eyes of these muted yellow walls, in the eyes of this country and the eyes of the world, there is nothing.  
  
“Is it about me?” Utivich eventually whispers.  
  
“Why do I have some suspicion that you already know what I’m referring to?”  
  
“Ca- cause you’re smart like that. I think you get me.”  
  
“Oh, I try to. It’s a delight.” To ensure they’re on the same page, a thumb ghosts over the mole, over his Adam’s apple. Utivich withholds a shudder. “Either way, this is the part of the romance novel where I apologize formally and write several handwritten letters of further apology for my... let’s call it drunken negligence.”  
  
“You’re talking about how you left me hanging, right?”  
  
“Shush, you. I did no such thing. We fell asleep simultaneously.”  
  
“No, I went after you cause there wasn’t a reason to be up!”  
  
Hans scoffs.  
  
“’Know you’re kinda heavy? Wait, sorry. That was mean. I didn’t mean that to’ve been mean,” Again, ridges appear between his eyebrows after this statement, but he doesn’t correct himself; “but you were– you were, you know, on top of me, and I couldn’t get up, so I went to sleep after a while.” He pauses, hands tussling. “I had to pee.”  
  
...Or perhaps not, how flummoxing. The word choice undeniably contributes,  but there is a standalone twang to his voice very reminiscent of how Aldo will enunciate on words with multiple vowels...  
  
“Oh, darling.” Hans stretches the word as he stands, his body not complaining with the motion for the first time in months;  “If that was the case, why didn’t you just wake me up?”  
  
Another pause, longer. “Well— see, cause– oh. I don’t know how to say it, I don’t think.”  
  
“Considering your history as pianist I’d think you know that to make a melody, first there must be a noise, no? Try.”  
  
Utivich takes a while to look at something that isn’t the rounded shine of Hans’ boots, and to fill the time he finishes buttoning up his shirt for him. “You won’t laugh?”  
  
“I promise you.”  
  
“I- I thought– it felt like– um.  It felt like when you go to the zoo and there’s... you know, one of the mothers sometimes just keeps her cubs or whatever beneath– her body, right, to protect them. And I thought of that, and it was... so I thought, _oh, no, I can’t go cause he made me a little... a nest thing._ S’asleep, but he was– you, you were real warm, and I’m in it and I get comfy, so I forgot I had to pee.”  
  
“Oh, Smithson.”  
  
This hug is much more abrupt than the night prior’s, but it makes more sense. It’s a bit warmer, if temperature must come into question. The fit is strange. Where Hans is angular and has precipices, Utivich is all sanded.  
  
“...what on Earth am I going to do with you,” Hans eventually finishes the thought.  
  
“I’m gonna go make some kinda... wrap, scarf thing outta the towel,  so... I made bandages that were like that a ton. It won’t take long, and then we... if you wanna, we can- uh, how’s, how’s breakfast sound?”  
  
Will his body allow this? He supposes that he’ll see as he attempts to, bridal style, raise Smithson and swing him around– and to no surprise at all, the Little Man is practically weightless. His joy-filled little squeal roars with innocence that allows Hans to ignore the thoughts that leak in about his neck, about the saturation of his lips. They do stir,  but he bypasses them all as they both twirl in circles, circles, circles. At some point of this, there is a kiss, and then they are swinging again—  
  
Until there is an abrupt intrusion. The door is pounded upon with such fervor that the lock is completely jolted out of it’s place and the door nearly buckles forward, and it is either the sound or the sight of this that makes Utivich’s mood warp around in a complete one-eighty. His face changes color with fear as he pulls himself downward to stand, albeit behind Hans, of course, who subsequently gets into... some sort of stance. Feet a few inches apart, his standard-issue boots are enunciated.  
  
A blitz of French, a woman’s voice– the one just now?– “Are you the Nazi?”  
  
“Don’t- don’t address him like that, and- they’re _all_ Nazis, don’t. He’s– ” _This_ is the voice of the receptionist, which intrigues. “Look, do you want him to–”  
  
“Oh yes, certainly, certainly. They’re all Nazis, yes, definitely, because _you booked fifty Nazis,_ how could I forget?”  
  
“Stop! He had a gun! _Has!_ It is in there! I was- I was scared!– ”  
  
_“They all have guns, girl!”_  
  
_It is in here,_ Hans says to himself in a thought, agreeing. At this particular juncture he doesn’t know what that thought means to him, but it is very loud.  
  
The clock woman, who sounds taller and larger, audibly riotous, has something hardly contained in her voice that seems to be out for blood. To an extent Hans is actually very afraid to open this door; he’s not dressed properly, he cannot find his hat anywhere, and there is a quite depraved internal mirror-image of himself who is having a dry laugh over Utivich’s hand placement around his waist, urging him to go somewhat lower. He outs this reflection by crushing it in an ashtray and urges his date to the bathroom, shushing him and telling him to be calm, while himself crossing toward his coat.  
  
“Please, please. My lovely, dearest...” Hans' voice twists as he gets a look at the clock woman. He begins to perspire as his body fights off a conniption of laughter. She is... the receptionist’s head, crinkled with age and atop Aldo Raine’s body, and everything in this world is fundamentally incorrect. Everything. “...mademoiselles. If there’s some issue it can be discussed rationally, can it not?”  
  
“You leave to _day,”_ spits the clock woman. “You and all of your beasts, as well. They go today. They’re out. _Today._ Before the afternoon, all of you, gone.”  
  
“...I see. Well, that seems rather harsh, no? To call them beasts, how degrading, and for what purpose? Tell me- was there an accident? I apologize for the surely awful conduct of my subordinates and the abruptness of our presence, but you _must_ understand our current... placement, in the world... How unfortunate things have been for our homeland? Can you imagine the strife? Haven't you heard what's happened?”    
  
The clock woman wails in exasperation, she’s off and away with a stomp that would put meteors to shame. Hans pivots towards the receptionist, voice scalding and unpersuadable as he digs his index finger into her chest, she stumbles backward. _“You._ You hid an entire human being from me. Explain.”  
  
“My, um. Well, that, she, she is- well, she is my grandmother, monsieur, and you- please understand you do need to leave.”  
  
“—and now it’s full of them! Full of them! My best rooms! _Full!”_ Descending with Hell’s volume down the stairs, she shouts incomprehensibly about Germany whilst a plane soars overhead, shudders the walls. The soldiers titter and the receptionist looks moments away from tears. “And these damn _planes,_ no less! What is happening here? Twenty since six!”  
  
Hans sighs. Half of his blood is still elsewhere and attempting to imbibe itself within Smithson. Relaxing his posture and closing much of the gap that divides the two of them, he eases his volume because without lipstick and with such a large amount of strands of hair loose this woman looks younger than his date. “No no no. That’s just no good. I don’t understand. Clarify this for me, my dear. You _must_ clarify this for me.”  
  
“The, the rules, they are the rules—”  
  
“Oh, it's a matter of rules, is it? Well, I do love a good rulebook. Sate my curiosity, when were these rules legitimized? Surely not last night, and nor this morning?” He gives her a look. “And if you would, further, who wrote them? May I speak with them?”  
  
“I’ve already- monsieur, I’ve already called in my- the- the owners. For permission. I cannot check in who I want anytime, I cannot just— And they told me—”  
  
“So _the owners,_ then, decided overnight upon a very impromptu Anti-German policy.”  
  
Some fringe has come loose and it falls from her forehead to her chin, and as she speaks Hans imagines her head as being bisected evenly down the center. Both halves disband and smack onto the floor. “Monsieur, it isn’t anti- _German—”_  
  
“Oh yes it is. Who knew the disagreement between the Powers and the Allies could miniaturize to a scale this petty. Regardless, considering this new, horrific _rule,_ you may be delighted to hear that we do have some of your _alignment_ boarding with us as well. Americans. By the owners' logic, they’ll be able to stay, yes? Come.” He takes her by the wrist- no destination in mind, but he envisions it amping her fear. It does, she shrieks. “Let’s sift them out of that big _rule_ book of yours and start _all_ over.”  
  
“No! Let go! Let go of me!”  
  
“Hm? What was that you said, my star-gilded little fräulein? You’ve seen a solution and we may all remain undisturbed and in peace? Oh, your mercy is boundless.” Riding off the last fumes of last night’s balletics, Hans swivels with his second captive to the soldiers, all of whom are staring- some with interest at the tactics they’ve seen- and swivels back to German as well: “She’s had a change of heart! Everything is fine. Breakfast is in fifteen minutes, dress yourselves.”  
  
A few cough, some exhibit genuine enthusiasm, some begin to disperse. “Oh, no. No, no. Not them. Monsieur, if you would _listen_ to me! It’s them that are the problem!”  
  
“But they are my family,” Hans replies with such immediacy she has a moment where she considers this truth. To add to the melodrama, he adds a trembling lip and a tremoring voice: “You wouldn’t sever me from them, fräulein, would you? How that would hurt me. You wouldn’t want to hurt me?”  
  
Does she like that word, he wonders? He can tell it’s shaking the frame of this entire endeavor on the opposite end of things; her face clears for a fraction of a second when he says it. Her voice responds small: “It’s wartime. We can’t do it, and that is that. Do you think I’m charging the others guests here? Do you know how much food your- your- your— _they_ will need?”  
  
Her look of immeasurable fear is warranted, _they_ do look threatening from here. This hallway is only half-lit as the sun isn’t reaching the opposite, west-facing windows, and like impalpable figures of shadow he can see a few left of the soldiers hanging out of their rooms and crowded around the staircase’s mouth, faces wrought in confusion and tiredness as though waiting for some sort of discipline worse than that which Hans has already doled them.  
  
“Not enough food and yet four floors, nearly all vacant. That’s so _curious_ to me, fräulein-”  
  
She interjects, “This-! Four floors that are _not_ wide by _any_ venture of the imagin—!”  
  
“-and beside that, scarcity was not a problem last night, now was it? Wartime is always a convenient excuse when it needs to be. What else is it ever?”  
  
Getting bored of her oily, patchy skin and her small-lipped face and her strandsy crown braid, Hans instead watches Rosenbluth manifest in the space the clock woman left behind, peeling in from between the half-dressed and blind-looking soldiers. His height is unreasonable.  
  
“Standartenführer,” he says, brandishing Hans’ hat. Ah, yes.  
  
He takes it in his free hand, flashing a smile that is so graphic Rosenbluth pulls away viscerally disgusted. Although he does not look, the receptionist continues to speak: “Then what reason should I give you? The real one didn’t tell you off. They are _already coming,_ what is there to not understand?”  
  
_“Fräuleeeein._ Oh, you’re not making any sense at all. Come, now,” Hans insists, taking both sides of her face in his hands and picturing both of her lungs collapsing when put to the task of inhaling his breath. “I told you clearly that this all would be very transient, and I always keep my word. We need little more than what we’ve already been given, tell me– why don’t you call the owners again and tell them we’ve already left? And we’ll be out of your hair,” spinning up strands in his finger, he tucks the left side of her fringe back into the corresponding braid, “before you can,” and here he winks, “blink.”  
  
She has an elegance-but-not-truly-elegance, the chin-raised manner of a rural maiden imitating the princess by fairytale-like descriptions alone. The back of her head, her sweat embellished forearms with lines of hair unseen to, the braid that from all the swinging and pulling has become Dutch. Her skirt trips her several times as she absconds back to her grandmother and Hans remembers Shosanna Dreyfus’ lithe body searing the plain with a speed only adrenaline can parent; how even as a speck in the distance he could tell she’d pulled a hamstring when her speed slowed and her form turned crooked, but the desire to survive is one that cannot be daunted.  
  
Soon, Hans is alone in the corridor that tethers Earth and Hell and Shosanna is too far out to be seen. He’s proud of her, in a way. Vicariously, he has shared the feat of that opulent cinema, and did once long ago drop in unexpected and later heard her silent sobs through the wall on a feigned trip to the backroom. If fear did not border things off, if they had met elseways, he would have loved to anneal his name somewhere on that ridiculously oversized piece or architecture, joint-owned it with her and treated her nicely. After all... it did save his life, millions and counting, and most importantly of all, Smithson’s.  
  
Pulling his wrist backward quickly, he makes an ‘uhp!’ sound. He re-holsters his pistol, his arm had been outstretched with it.  
  
He withdraws back into the room with no hurry, faced again with it’s opulent Toile de Jouy patterning and Smithson sat on the edge of the bed in clear trepidation, finger spinning up a whirlpool in the sheets with that _damned_ towel shrouding his handiwork from the world, but Hans is in a state of absolute bliss.  
  
“Everything’s okay?”  
  
Taking him in his arms, Hans just about sings into his hair. “Everything is full of wonders.”

 

***

  
  
Early afternoon in the dining hall.  
  
Compared to last night, the assortment of tables have been somewhat altered. The room is lit by sunlight, the sky is clear and the great amount of windows compliment the gray walls, the rug-covered floors, the intricate flower tapestries, the overall palette is still white and yellow. The cutlery and the placemats reflect this. A small design of an etched flower is in the bottom right corner of the menu and he stares at it when he has nowhere else to look.  
  
He continues to overhear the receptionist— _Fräulein Joliette,_ he plans to call her from now on; she’s been in the reception’s little back room and it took no more than a simple inversion of the registry to see her name besides her role, written in fine script— speaking of him presumptuously to her grandmother, her words heartless, though at the end of it all cowardice has triumphed over common sense as it always does. He thinks about this. His pistol is still upstairs. It’s _there._ He’s mutely scared that it’s there.  
  
Smithson is up in that room as well, having said he needed a moment to cool off after they had breakfast together, a benevolent chat and his soft, salmon-toned face. Hans knows he’s being grabby and impatient and improper with this relationship, and he needs to deaden his needs which keep finding ways to exploit his morals, but _somehow_ this work never gets done.  A pervasive fear illustrates the worst turns of events while another quadrant of him puzzles over what ‘cool off’ means. An idiom he’s never encountered yet, and though he knows the meanings of both _cool_ and _off,_ idioms tend to change the meanings of the words involved, don’t they-  
  
_‘Cool off?’_ says a note in the margins of one of his less significant journals. A golden plaque upon the mental desk now says _‘Cool Off’_. With half-formed flowcharts he’s attempted to break down the etymology, becoming more and more disillusioned with the remembrance that he does have a language barrier to combat. He’d forgotten. Hermann is no adversary, Rosenbluth’s English is... it’s doubtful whether or not he knows any languages aside from German, Aldo’s syntax is simplistic— with the exception of the term _behooves,_ whatever _that_ means, did he invent that word? Hooves like those of an animal? Hooves- _sein?_ — and Smithson’s vocabulary is blossoming with his comfort, but he can’t imagine anything trickier than this sudden term, _cool-off,_ to drop from the Heavens.  
  
Breakfast was chaste and temperate, strudel-free and dubious-alcohol-content-free, but there unfortunately were looks. Hans criticizes himself when he knows it necessary. There were looks, looks so implying, fevered and sordid that were Utivich really so vestal, he would have wilted underneath them in seconds.  
  
Hans is entirely aware that he eye-fucked Smithson while sitting directly across from him and he did so mirthfully.  
  
Today is business oriented. There are a wide splay of papers before him, what precious little he could scavenge out of his office in the rush, and in an hour or so he’ll be able to borrow this hotel’s lone typewriter as he’s been told. He thinks about the amount of planes he’s seen thus far since initially sitting down, and for every one he sees he makes a small vertical line down an obsolete document. There are seven lines. He is sat by the windows for this purpose. One of the planes sported German insignia which made a slight amount of hope well up in his stomach, but it did a U-turn. There were three American flags in succession.  
  
Transforming like the most elegant of all butterflies, she becomes a waitress with the addition of wings– an apron that was once white but now bears the color and texture of a potato sack. Delighted, Hans laces his fingers and balances his chin over the back of his hands, leaning forward in his seat to get a good look at her.  
  
“Joliette, the tallest sunflower in my field. How long has it been since I last was graced by your divine, affable presence...”  
  
Her face wheels through every emotion there is. “You... _bastard!”_ Though it isn’t yelled, more squeaked.  
  
She whacks him with the pitcher she’s carrying when he snickers, but he’s too happy to explode as he otherwise might have. How was a braid ever possible? Her hair is that wiry, dense coily type that combs cannot penetrate. He wants to ask if she knows the situation in Paris, drop it casually into conversation in the midst of his order; there’s other guests here and his men are stringing around, obeying their directive to _be unobtrusive,_ but it feels so impossible that nobody _knows_ yet. He imagines standing up and telling them, uttering things that have been hidden.  
  
Internally he smacks himself on the wrist for his words. No more long, stringing compliments, save that for Smithson when he’s done _cooling off,_ see his cheeks lift. Joliette hits him once more for good measure, but Hans is smiling lovingly off into the distance– “Oh, drunk again?” she asks, but he does not hear. His relationship, new, right out of the packaging and strawberry-scented, is still ossifying, lowering, taking it’s form in the same way fingers will dovetail.  
  
“So, about this apron... Don’t tell me you’re the only one cooking here.”  
  
“What should I tell you, then?”  
  
“Oh, beautiful. The resolve! What is a woman if not multifaceted? I’m impressed, quite impressed. I’m very excited to taste your wonders, fräulein.”  
  
She makes a face at that. Hans checks himself again, smacks himself _twice_ on the wrist, and his lips prim when he tries to restrain himself from descending into side-splitting laughter. He is hit harder, but he’s still too elated to mind.  
  
“My _God,_ why would you _say it that way?"_  
  
“I’d like an, let me see. An... It’s not here. A gnocchi. I want a gnocchi and yet nowhere do I see one. I would like, if you would, a gnocchi à la Parisienne, with whatever extras you feel inclined to add to it. I’m not choosy. Your choice soup– and when I say choice, I mean _your_ favorite, fräulein.” -she scoffs and calls him repulsive among other things he cannot translate, he smacks himself on the wrist three times- “A side-bowl of gravy, and I’m not feeling much for formalities, the idea is to eat. I also... hmm, hmm. Well, the afternoon just started, but I am very urged to make an odd request.”  
  
“I am _this_ near to walking away. Do not push it.”  
  
Hans watches her eyes as she stares at his uniform. “Could I raise my hopes to possibly get a strudel?”  
  
“...With your breakfast?”  
  
“Hunger calls and it says as it pleases. The one you made last night was delectable.”  
  
“Oh, no. That was not me. That was my grandmother, she... before all this,” Joliette waves her hand in a circle, “she made cakes in Florence.”  
  
“I’ll try a cake later then. That’s all.” Hans sees another plane, believes it to be French, drags his pen down once more. _"Merci bien, meine Sonnenblume."_  
  
He smacks himself four times on the wrist.

The strudel is grounding, and he eats it slowly. It tastes like a poorly made French dupe because it is a poorly made French dupe, but one gets what didn’t pay for because one acquired it for free through fear tactics. He lulls his thoughts back down to something he actually cares about- he wishes he could’ve given him a genuine strudel as opposed to this, but at least he was enjoying himself. Too much, likely. The look that was on his face is etched into the wood of Hans’ mental desk. _‘Cool’_ is an adjective and occasionally a verb, but when combined with the word _‘off’,_ they become a compound verb-  
  
Another plane soars. Planes and burning trucks. Planes and burning trucks and captives and bachelors and dates and poorly made- it really isn’t that bad, he knows he’s being picky- French strudels and towels and crown braids and _not being smashed, but making things very weird_ as well as the phenomenon of _cooling off._  
  
When they feel like letting everyone know of the tumors they are, Aldo and Hermann walk in and sit on the parallel end of the dining room and in spite of all attempts to pretend he cannot see them, doing so seems to inflate their presence. Aldo, white suit now stained beigeish by sweat and whatever substance he’s been rolling in, has a half unbuttoned shirt and his blazer is nowhere to be seen. The cummerbund ought to not be there as on him it serves no purpose. They point at things on their menus and communicate with Joliette through gesticulations—  
  
“And he wants five of this, so five, _fünf,_ erm- Lieutenant Raine, do you know how to say five in French?”  
  
After a solid minute of his lips quirked hard to the side of his face, Aldo looks up: “Pretty sure it’s _dix._ Tell her _dix.”_  
  
“Yes, Lieutenant Raine.” To Joliette: “He wants five of these, yes, so, _dicks._ _Dicks_ of this. This one here.”  
  
Hans wonders why he’s stared at by all three of them for his cackling. Was it not warranted?  
  
—and after she is gone, their conversation is just out of earshot. Aldo has no complaints and believes the extra bowls of mashed potatoes he got are complimentary. Hermann seems undisturbed overall, but the majority of his job is to stomach the whims of mediocre men.  
  
So it’s a sin to have desert at one in the afternoon, but Aldo can have hard liquor?  
  
Aldo, who says- well, shouts- the word _‘what’_ across the room, and Hans realizes he’s been staring. The noise makes Joliette jump a foot in the air, and her braid becomes Dutch again. She exclaims and stares Hans down as though it’s his fault.  
  
After he’s had enough time to think about it, he exhales a cloud from a cigarette he doesn’t remember lighting. When he goes for a sip from his coffee, had the gravy pitcher not been shaped the way it is he doubtlessly would have doused himself in it. “Would you come over here?”  
  
He has this natural odor irrespective of the sweat, and it daunts. It reminds Hans of... gasoline? “Yeah?”  
  
“And good morning to you, as well. I will be straightforward. What does it mean to ‘cool off’’?”  
  
“Interesting that you wanna ask me.”  
  
“Consider that I’ve left my dictionary at home and there are but two people in this building who regard English as their _Muttersprache._ One is upstairs and the other is bathing in the entirety of the gin selection. I didn’t even know they had that here. Congratulations. Anyhow, manners, Lieutenant. Pull up a chair, I’ve asked you a question.”  
  
The chair screeches and Aldo plops himself down, hands folded behind his head and both legs some loose semblance of crossed. Through the lapels of his collar the roses he was gifted are threaded, stems clipped. Hans stares at that thoroughly unsure how it makes him feel. “Soooooo. Pour some ice water over your head. There, you just cooled off.”  
  
Expectant pause, expectant look. “That’s it?”  
  
“Ain’t much.”  
  
“So you... cool off. You literally... _cool_ off. What is the ‘off’ for? Surely you just _cool?”_  
  
“Does cool down grab you better?”  
  
Referring with quick looks back to the journal, there is an ignored section of the flowchart where this was considered. “Those are _the same thing?”_  
  
“I’m wondering about the value of any of your supposed detective work.”  
  
Aldo is already stood, but Hans has him by the wrist. The glove only furthers the chafe; “This isn’t an euphemism. Is it? If it were an euphemism, you would have told me. Yes?”  
  
“If it was a _euphemism._ Huh.” when Aldo pulls himself out of the grasp, the word is stressed.  
  
“Well, I’d think you should know the difference between the words and what the words suggest? You did go to University, after all.”  
  
This sits Aldo back down. While the ‘A’ sector of the mental libraries have much more significant fillings, this is still posted somewhere as a small notice. “Alright, alright. Uh, well, looky. Context would help. If you say that going outside after an argument or somethin, usually means you’re gonna go walk in circles for a while and calm down. Or you’re gonna find a bar somewhere. Varies from person to person and your own maturity.”  
  
“It does have multiple meanings.  Okay then, let’s- hmm. Let’s say my context is... not an argument, exactly, but an ordinary exchange between two people. Amicable, even.”  
  
“You referring to something specific?”  
  
They share a disquieted look. A plane goes by. “No.”  
  
“Yeah, I bet not.”  
  
“You bet correctly! I foresee grand winnings ahead of you. Cheers!”  
  
They clink with Hans’ coffee cup and the bottle Aldo brought over. Pensively, he nurses it in silence as Hans continues to bother with his documents until he raises his chin and gets his attention. “Sounds to me like you’re still on the hunt.”  
  
Although the cigarette still has a good amount of length left, he ousts it wordlessly once his face stops doing the complicated thing it was doing as a response to that. “Wow. Dear me. What a cruel thing to say about the last living member of your away team.”  
  
“What a cruel thing to do to a buncha innocent people, helping to facilitate their deaths.”  
  
“Oh, this again. _Yes,_ Lieutenant. I have sinned greatly, my spot in Hell is girded off with velvet rope, my soul is irredeemable, yes yes yes. This isn't a confessional. You could surely bear to stop reminding me."

"Why's it that you're more bothered by my remindin ya than what you did?"

Hans' shoulders practically touch his earlobes and his smile is as faux as they come. "Remember that none of it was of my own volition."

"So let's say someone tells you to fire a gun n' you do it. But you didn't kill em though, right?"

"I must ask, why is this so personal to you? You are so... bothered. You take it personally. I can tell you do. For a detached observer, it’s very-”  
  
“Ain’t detached.” Aldo takes an impressive swig and snatches Hans’ coffee as a chaser- who stares incredulously, how is this man still alive?- “Mother’s side.”  
  
“...Oh. I see. And here I thought you were all American.” That's new. Hans cannot process this information, it stands like a blockade before him. A mammoth-sized non sequitur from everything he had assumed about Raine and what little his documents provided. His eyebrows stay raised. “...So, then, you _yourself_ are also–”  
  
“More by blood than faith, but I grew up with it. Why else’d I get back into action _‘less_ it was personal to me, huh? _'Less_ I was _bothered?”_  
  
Does Hans have extended use for this information? No, but it’s thrown up next to the compliment. “I feel as if we’re drawing near to unearthing a conversation we didn’t have time to finish?”  
  
After another look, Aldo’s shoulders rise once. He plucks the fork off the placement and proceeds, casually as anything, to eat what Hans has neglected– so is to say, the entire meal except the strudel. “Now from my memory, you walked out on it.”  
  
“If we’re here, we’re here. Ahem, if you'd allow me to ask this- I suppose there’s no one with a higher chance of knowing this than yourself, given you’re so _learned_ , ahem. Why is there absolutely no documentation whatsoever on your Private? Can I ask you that? Why does he not exist?”  
  
“Probably shouldn’t be telling your ass this but I guess it don’t matter too much now. Just lost most of his registrations. Not me, but they lost em. Got ‘m mixed up in transport. Bureaucratic fuckup. If they knew his name they wouldn’t have been calling him little, is my guess.”  
  
“You don’t think nicknames are fun, Apache?”  
  
“You like yours?”  
  
“You know, I swear we’ve talked about this already. I can hardly hold those responsible for it accountable at this point. I’ve been forced to accept it. If I do not, well, what can be done?”  
  
“Yep, knew it.” He moves the plate completely to his side and slides the soup over more carefully. “You wanna describe this amicable exchange?”  
  
Hans pours the gravy for him. Life has ceased to make sense. “We talked amicably, a need to cool off was uttered, and away he went. Slipped through my fingers.”  
  
“Still up there?”  
  
“In all likelihood.”  
  
Aldo taps the corners of his mouth with a napkin that isn’t even his. He eats slowly, but he’s finished with the plate at a ludicrous speed. “Sounds like he came to his senses. Must’ve realized just how much of a crackpot you really are.”  
  
Petulantly aggravated by the fact he doesn’t know what a _‘crackpot’_ is either and too overcome by pride to ask, in an abrupt motion Hans shoves the strudel’s plate across to him, scrunching up the table cover and nearly knocking the original plate off. His face has begun to dense and lose its’ color. “Do you want this? I don’t want this.”  
  
“Something wrong with it?”  
  
“I poisoned it for you but forgot and ate it myself. My stomach is now agitated, hopefully your constitution is stronger than mine.”  
  
“Guess we’ll see. ‘Kinda poison?”  
  
“If I told you, it would ruin the surprise.  You’re dismissed.”  
  
Aldo snorts bemusedly, his laugh is dry. “So you’re dismissin me now, huh?”  
  
“I do believe that is what I just did. Enjoy your time with Hermann, send him my regards.”  
  
“He’s right there.”  
  
“You may have observed that we aren’t speaking.” With an incline of his head that almost looks regal, something quite ferocious flashes over his narrowed eyes. “But you two most certainly are.”  
  
When the energy between them takes the hard dip that it does, when the ceasefire has met its’ halt, the cameras are lowered and Aldo has watched Hans skip his way back to his adjacent stance in their mutual hostility, he decides to participate.  
  
In some way that is wholly impenetrable, their animus is different than any other. _Richer,_ though, is probably the word; their stares are so equal in force, so alike in obdurateness. Hans is a pest wearing leather, so much of a maggot that Aldo can picture him taking joy in seeing the bodies he’s employed to assess— but there is something very intricate about these looks he has. They’re a part of his interrogations that goes by another name. His posture is as stately as the curves of a harp, he looks as though he’ll assure his own victory merely by splintering someone beneath his gravitas...  
  
...but it doesn’t work on Aldo. Not much.  
  
Aldo, who’s expression is not as assiduous, given, but he hasn’t blinked yet. When he stabs his strudel sideways to cut it, the plate chinks.  
  
Hans’ eyebrow continues to slant in this minor twitch and his hands fist and unfist because it isn’t working. Aldo looks bored. Unmoved. It doesn’t work- not as it’s been carefully honed to be able to do, and on his side of the monolith that divides them that is an immense counterweapon. Enzo faltered so readily because Aldo never believed in the character in the first place, and Hans read that with ease. The actual man’s presence smashes wills and rips Hans’ out directly.  
  
A plane goes by. Hans doesn’t see what country it hails from.  
  
“Somethin weird about that?”  
  
Oh, that word, that word, _that word._ For a moment Hans’ mind takes a pleasant saunter elsewhere and his smile returns. “...I just find it very affectionate, very mutual. Did you know that he wants to improve his English for your approval? Aren’t you flattered?”  
  
“Really now.”  
  
“Absolutely. But remember that you didn’t hear it from me.”  
  
“Hey, Colonel.” Aldo mirrors his posture. “What do you say we play a round of detective. Eh? Sound good?”  
  
“Well, then! Finally something interesting. What is this?"  
  
“Yep. Just gone take a look at all this stuff you told me just now. So like you say, there’s two people here that speak English as their, their uh,  what’d you say, mooter-spraychuh—”  
  
_“–Sprache._ _Mutter_ , _spra_ che.–”  
  
“— cause, look, he didn’t ask me. Since I can’t think of a time he could’ve ever had to ask my Private I’m gonna make an educated guess that he went for the runner up. Who’s that?”  
  
Eyes widened and fingers laced in a show of innocence, Hans leans forward and again ripples the table cover. The anger, blunt as it is, peers out from between two semi-important papers that now bear coffee rings. “Could that be me?”  
  
“And I’m guessin you didn’t take too kindly to that. Lord knows your reason.”  
  
“And this is where your speculation loosens into strings. Why would I be angered by that? I taught him everything he knows. Sentence structure, phonetics, the difference between good _night_ and good _bye._ I would have no reason to deny him any–”  
  
“Who did that to his face, then?”  
  
“Oh, I don’t know. Aren’t we playing to find that out?”  
  
“Mmm. I get it. Alright, alright. It’s your game, ‘course you play it good.” Hans tilts his head with appreciation, mouths ‘the best’. “Lemme rephrase that. So from where we’re looking at it now, it wasn’t me and it wasn’t you. Logically. Suggestin otherwise don’t make sense. But since I’m just imitating, how bout you tell me who you think it was? Isn’t much of my place to say I know what I'm doin when I don't."  
  
“You don’t believe yourself capable of becoming a great old master of the sleuthing world? I think otherwise. It's a tiny circle here, we desperately need new applicants. If you're not busy when all of this is over...?"  
  
“I’m good down in the mines, thanks.”

"The top of the mountain gets very lonely from time to time... and your Private would rather work in a metallurgy than with me. He told me that, did you know? So sad."

"Didja try askin Hermann?"

"No I didn't ask _Hermann,"_ Hans hotly denies, too fast. He takes a moment of composure, lining his papers neatly and adjusting the little vased flower atop the table's center more times than necessary. "Trust me when I say I’ve been meaning to spark my intrigue, but... look at all of these papers. There has been no time. Do you know we’re being shooed out of this hotel as we speak? But I assure you there will be a lengthy investigation, those red-handed will be brought to justice, et cetera. In my own view, I do believe it to have been one of my... what did you call them? Boys? Is it _boys_ or _krauts_ today?”  
  
“Which of em?”  
  
“Either Hermann Five or Hermann Thirty-seven. Those two are very mischievous. Always getting up to nonsense. Conspiring.”  
  
“You numbered em.”  
  
“I did! For my own convenience.”  
  
“Y’all just love doing that, huh?” When Hans gets it, his expression sours and he tries to interject, but is spoken over: “So which number is Hermann?”  
  
_“That_ Hermann or some other Hermann?”  
  
“Which Hermann are we talkin bout, Colonel?”  
  
“We can talk about any Hermann you’d like to talk about. I am the dutiful mother hen and it is as though they are my little chicks.”  
  
“Yeah, let’s talk bout the one who got his nose cracked.”  
  
“Oh, I don’t want to talk about _that_ Hermann. He’s as mischievous as the other two. I’m quite sure he’s plotting against me. Is he? You should know, since you’ve fallen so enamored.”  
  
Aldo sighs curtly and Hans sips what is left of his cold coffee and his body wants to lay down because it always wants something and, like himself, like Aldo Raine, is appeased by nothing. “Do you know... he’s still there... and looking at you? Pity. How lonely he must be. Let’s refer to my watch, which tells me I dis _missed_ you... eight _minutes_ ago.”  
  
“Do something for me.”  
  
“Of course.” These words are stretched long across a thick drawl, his eyes growing impossibly dark.  
  
“Take your gloves off.”  
  
“Oh?”  
  
“Don’t play dumb. Take em off.”  
  
“...From one graduate to another, tell me why  I should indulge you.”  
  
“Cause I told you to.”  
  
Another stare and with it a pause. “Because you _told_ me to,” Hans, who does not let himself be interrogated ever, echoes as he places his cup down and stands. “Hmm. Well, I’ve things to do now. I’ll be on my w-”  
  
A hand clamps stiffly around Hans’ wrist with a grip too iron to be real. Fingers press into his veins. His head thunders during the trial, error, and subsequent realization that unlike the reverse setup, he cannot pull himself free. He struggles without guile, garnering very fixed attention from the rest of the room- Joliette included, the miserable fräulein, who he glowers at.  
  
“Sit down.”  
  
“Let go. Let go, this- this _instant._ Let, go.”  
  
“I don’t like repeating myself, and I know you’re not gonna make me hafta do it a second time.”  
  
“Oh yes? And what, if, I, do?”

“Find out.”

By pulling his wrist one more time, it would seem he has intent to—  
  
And with one strong yanking motion, Hans loses all his weight beneath Aldo's might. His chest snacks against the table and where his other hand tried to stabilize him, papers have been dragged, ripped, and the table cover is strewn up in thick rolls of fabric. The gravy spills, his hat becomes diagonal and Joliette is cursing them both from afar. Aldo sees it coming before Hans attempts to pull himself upright and out of the grasp in a quick movement, and when it happens he has him pulled again until his entire upper body is flattened against it.  
  
The migraine flickers back into operation like a smashed headlight. Charily, he sits. He blinks too much, papers are now littered all over the floor, a duo of planes soar overhead, Aldo’s stare wins. It ebbs away everything Hans knows himself to be. It sheds his gloves one by one.  
  
As his hands grasped for contact with his date the night prior, it was a miracle that Smithson never noticed the reddening around his knuckles. Nor as he pushed that fork across— Aldo slices the strudel and takes a bite as he watches Hans sputter and threaten to fizz out completely, the soundwaves of the plate _chinking_ could level a civilization faster than any missiles, he doesn’t _proportion_ it correctly, he takes away triangles instead of squares— and nor as they danced.  
  
“Yup,” Aldo says with a throat-clear. Perhaps Utivich’s obedience is a learned trait. Aldo finishes the strudel, rolls his shoulders as he stands. “You enjoy your afternoon.”  
  
“I fail to see what you gained from this.”  
  
A pause. With his voice much lower, Aldo leans over the table and _much too close_ to Hans’ general proximity of personal space. “Oh, my own ‘mount of nothing, sure. But I was thinking bout Hammersmark this morning and _how_ she coulda gotten to just dropping off the map like that. That coupled with Hermann, I dunno. Just makes me wonder.”  
  
Hans takes a breath that sharpens on the exhale. “You’re wording yourself poorly.”  
  
“Cause I can’t see how big of a difference they’ve got, is Herm just less... disposable? Scared someone would notice, all these fuckin krauts you got out here, maybe? My Private?”  
  
“Aldo.” Hans stretches his name warningly.  
  
With this, Aldo heads back to his table with an amble that suggests he overate. Hermann welcomes him with a cheer and some needless applause that is waved down.  
  
Because he needs to see Smithson or at the very least be in the same room as him, his papers are hastily stacked back to immaculacy as the gazes of the guests fade. The windows are open, the breeze is subzero, the sun is bleaching the room white-hot.  
  
This yellow is infuriating. Like a coil released from nearly five decades of tension, Hans is stumbling out of the hall and into the corridor that links it to the main building, an artery with long windows that touch the ceiling. There, he collides with  a human barricade of his own guards. They only happened to be standing in a semicircle, blocking the reception room entirely; upon seeing him, he is trapped in the pincer.  
  
“Good day, Standartenführer,” they all say, in perfect unison. As though rehearsed. Hans feels a sickness creeping up his leg. His eyebrows cannot come lower from the center of his forehead.  
  
“Yes,” he says.  
  
Each one has questions he has no answers for. He fabricates with a staggeringly uneven success rate; the moment Heinsohn asks where all the planes are going another flies over their heads and rumbles the walls. “See? Just like that. Where is it going, Standartenführer?”  
  
Hans says something in response to that, something vague and meant to be assuring. Something about the Fatherland and it’s greatness and unceasing diligence.  
  
“But none of them are German.”  
  
“Incorrect. You didn’t see the one which passed not even an hour ago?”  
  
“Did you not see it turn back around, Standartenführer?” Engelbrecht asks.  
  
“That it indeed did, yes. However-” These men have been standing here. All morning. Gawking at the clouds. The visual is funny, really. “To _refuel,_ obviously-”  
  
“We have fuel in France?” Stoltzfus asks.  
  
“What kind of question is that? Of course we have fuel in France. Do you want us to not have fuel in France? What if we have this exact circumstance? The most redundant question I’ve ever heard in my life.”  
  
“Erm, if I may, Standartenführer, since... when, have we had fuel in this part of France?” Bloms asks.  
  
He values all of these men far more than any of his stalwart little Hermanns, but Hans is still at odds with the fact that they are all taller than him. That is the point of a guard, undeniably, but he imagines being knocked over and pinned to the floor should he answer incorrectly. He imagines being throttled by Aldo after being told to remove his gloves again and his palms reveal the reddened areas where they compressed a throat. A disconnected thought, but it’s melded with the mental desk and is draped atop _‘Cool Off’._ Papers are scattered and there’s twenty different French dupe strudels on decorative plates stacked haphazardly. A baby pink rose is in the center of the bedlam, without petals yet with thorns.  
  
“...Oh. You, you are dreadfully behind. Either someone failed to inform you or you failed to inform yourself. Now, I’ll address all of this once I've completed my work-”  
  
“It’s not even two o’clock, Standartenführer. Do you know how many planes have passed?”  
  
Engelbrecht raises up a crude piece of paper that parallels what he did himself. It depicts an assortment of dots with names of countries next to them. Forty dots which are divided between Britain, France and the U.S., only one dot is beside Germany. The U.S. has the most dots. Hans gawks at this paper until his eyes burn.  
  
The typewriter is no longer a priority. He walks into the back room uninvited which, again, makes Joliette leap backwards, knocking her pitcher asunder. He convinces her to part with her telephone for what he promises to be a mere ten minutes, and when she gives in due to his unceasing diligence he has a comfortable high-backed chair pulled up to the desk and a mediocre yet direct connection to Germany– and to the kitchen, who streamlines him cups of coffee. His guards hover nearby, eavesdropping, interloping, sneezing on each other and whatever else they’re paid by the state to do. Three more cups of coffee, none of which he finishes.  
  
It’s exceptionally difficult to reach Berlin. None of the numbers he knows pick up, and when he starts trying to call individuals the lack of answers are even more distressing. He looks to the guest book, sees the names of his colleagues- these people could all be dead. Are they? The thought querkens. By the time the sun has began to low there are still no answers, at least three hundred attempted calls. Planes, burning trucks, bachelors, piano recitals, interrogations, gloves, guards, poorly made French strudels, dupes, the dupe mole on Engelbrecht’s neck that parallels Smithson’s which really aggravates Hans for an unknown reason, being killed by Aldo, being choked to death by Aldo, the color yellow, frustration at today’s tidings. Rosenbluth. There he is. Rosenbluth. The only competent one. Walking around... in what eventually patterns out... to be circle after circle.  
  
“Rosenbluth,” Hans calls, and his voice wavers once.  
  
“Yes, Standartenführer.”  
  
“You- ahem. You do- you do remember the young man I had you bring that basket to, yes?”  
  
In the mirror on the wall, he sees his body give him a look of death when he goes patting up and down for his cigarette case once again. His hat is getting bigger, his head smaller. He swears it.  
  
“Indeed, Standartenführer.”  
  
“Wake him if he’s asleep.  Room- the room is— no. You know where the room is. And... since you’re apt at minding your own business, I’d like for you to go into the drawer of the nightstand to the right side of the bed and bring me what’s there.” Pause. He adds, not looking at anything, “The room is 415.”  
  
The number was already cycling through Rosenbluth’s mind long before it was stated, and he walks upstairs in his guarded, unflappable silence with the key jingling in his pocket.

 

***

  
  
He keeps his shoulders a straight line.  
  
To c _ool off_ is to nap, let the food digest, do a handstand for five minutes, flounder around limblessly when all of his blood struggles to get back where it needs to be, stand on the armchair and punch the lightbulb some pretending he knows how to box, pray while walking in confused circles, pray properly afterward, nap again, almost throw up, really throw up- but significantly less than he used to, and Hans has undoubtedly contributed to this betterment.  
  
A memory is trying to pierce the semitransparent film of a hangover’s vestiges, and the sounds of the attempts resound: a quiet thump upscaling into a loud thump. It is the memory of _treachery, tragedy and travesties,_ it is his name _fitting the face by which it is beheld,_ it is a long-drawled _Smithsooooon._ It is sitting on his lap, which felt strange, but now feels stranger than it did in the moment. That’s weird. That’s something girls do.  
  
All of this, scantily processed by Utivich’s own mental desk equivalent which in both form and function is more of a high-chair. It’s _Smit,_ really, sometimes _Smithy_ or _Smitty,_ rarely _Smithson._ That name is heavy and bizarre. It calls back memories of breaking some old heirloom, or skipping class due to an inexplicable but deep sadness.  While sweeping he was _Smith,_ but that was too short-lived to really make an impact on his personality in the long-term, whoever he is these days, sitting like a girl on a man’s lap, making out with a Nazi.  
  
This thought shrinks him and drags a sound out, a panicked whimper.  
  
Now that the alcohol is completely out of his system, he’s in a bad mood. He’s confused. He imagines what his mother would say.

He imagines bringing Hans to their cramped, relative-stocked, mosquito-infested vaguely moldy apartment after repeatedly warning him how bad it'll be up there. Imagination Hans, though, is as courteous as ever and ensures he won't mind anything he sees, one of those sturdy arms of his wrapped protectively around Imagination Smit's back and clenching a bit as a rodent runs past. It's a winding walk to the fifteenth floor on the narrow staircase; every time someone comes down they have to flatten themselves against the wall, everyone greets Imagination Smit in a flurry of _long time no see_ this, _where in the world have you been_ that and general questions how his studies are going. The first door on the left has the least chips in the paint because that's one of Smit's monthly chores. People are chatting inside, a record is on and there's the _loud_ wind he remembers blowing in through an open window because the walls are paper thin. Thus, nobody hears Imagination Smit as he knocks, so Imagination Hans steps in— _"May I?"_ he asks— and knocks hard. Quiet covers what Imagination Smit can tell is the living room in an instant, and his older brother- his footsteps make such a distinct sound- takes one look out of the peephole before jumping back and wailing— _"He's home!"—_ but as Imagination Hans speaks no Hebrew, he turns and asks what was said. Imagination Smit has no chance to reply before his mother has done an olympic sprint towards the door, alongside her everyone else who isn't running in an opposite direction to wake someone else up.

Imagination Smit is in the arms of his mother, she as well in his, and it becomes a pileup of multiple people hugging from several directions at once. Imagination Hans stands with his hands folded behind his back and is never acknowledged until Imagination Smit goes out of his way to point him out— _"Um, really quick, I wanted to... introduce- this is my, my frie-"_ — but this is spoken over by his mother, in tears, rushing back inside to fix a proper meal. Imagination Hans is girded away, girded out, and stands in waiting for a century.

In an alternative playing out of this same tragedy, it ends much sooner. Hans takes one look at the crumbling bricks that lead up to their glorified tenement, turning on his heel, and by any available means returning to Ostmark.  
  
Smit is in a _bad_ mood and he knows so because he’d never think these things in another circumstance— he would, truthfully, but he’d clip the thoughts before they could grow this loud. His relatives and siblings are... a barricade, in the future tense? His mother? It isn’t a tenement and he grew up in there. He doesn’t mind sharing his bedroom and he loves the long thread of relatives his mother continuously refuses to turn away. Would she turn Hans away? What kind of person does Hans look like, what kind of person _is_ he, other such introspective questions, a light retching comes on.  
  
Here he struggles to keep his shoulders straight as he coughs, as he almost spits, sequestered beneath thick sheets that–  
  
Oh, that’s something. These sheets... smell like Hans, now that he thinks about it. They really do, a faint leftover imprint of vanilla and tobacco. The weird inner clench he feels at this thought keeps him rolling  around rotisserie style, writhing. He’s scared to have slept in a bed with someone else, shared breath and the dust of the room and just _had_ that without needing to discuss it extensively beforehand. The thought of being intertwined in the same way they were repels and entices. That happened- _knock, knock, knock_ \- and with a man, no less.  
  
A thumbtacked thought, ‘a man’, as if that should be making some important distinction between two already undefined things. For the last handful of months he was surrounded by men and their tendencies, the aura of testosterone and agitation as well as occasional so-called _pornos_ which of course they had when they’d turn up. They were communal as bullets, passed around easily, borrowed for the night, analyzed, discussed, wolf-whistled at. His mother’s extended influence kept him as impassive towards them as Hugo, but he looked. He looked and tried to see what there was to see.  
  
And when the fortune wheel revolved to him, without response to the inevitable teases he would simply take it with the obedience of the herded. It would hang loose under his arm once night fell, he’d go outside whatever abandoned house they were all holed up in and, guided by moonlight, walk a ways off. The pictures, yes, but reading the blurbs, mostly– which were short, nonsensical, mentioning aliases and the woman depicted’s favorite position, but substance was in critical lack. He couldn’t coax himself into doing anything and neither could the pictures, the pinups, the sultry unbuttoned leotards and the short-skirted dresses.  
  
In a way, he tried to take after Hugo who would snatch the thing, read it in front of everyone, and be bored about it. Visibly teeming with inertia. And after that, as though nothing had ever taken place, he would be back to sharpening his knife.  
  
In Manhattan he spent his time chiefly surrounded by men irrespective of his opinions towards them, and although girls were at Foreign Languages as well as elsewhere they never held his attention- not because he didn’t like them, but because they...?  
  
This thought trails off and hits a dead end. Smit is staring at a wall, and someone that is not Hans is knocking on the door. He knows it’s not Hans because the door isn’t locked, and his knock probably wouldn’t be like that... it would be lighter, more singsong. Gentle, like he is. Not as stoic. There will be three hard knocks, a few heartbeats will get to pass, and those knocks will mimic themselves perfectly just like the way they reuse sound effects in... cartoons, not... mystery novels. He begins to cough again, ends up spitting over the nightstand and groaning so loud he wins six knocks instead of three.  
  
—If Hans is the second one, maybe... he was the first one? That’s a funny, terrifying, confusing thought, and he spits again.  
On the fourth repetition of the mag being passed around– _“There’s a drought so get used to Shirley, get me?”_ Donny said and Wicki snorted and Omar groaned and Aldo, elsewhere, snored–  the wheel ticker whacked Hugo and he’d taken it outside during his watch.  
  
Smit swears up and down he was just going to use the bathroom. He didn’t have to, but he was because someone– who?– inside was smoking and he’s never been much for that. Birds in migration, all black, swept overhead and he looked up to follow them with his eyes. Over the camp to the east, over the crumbling remains of mortar and wall hit by a projectile, Hugo sat on the second floor with his legs swinging from where the wood splintered and there was a steep drop off.  
  
“How’d’ch getta there?” he asked.  
  
Climbed the stairlike formation just beside him, but due to sleep deprivation coupled with a horrific drinking dare Smit was experiencing symptoms not unlike extreme jet lag. The slur of his words got him a stare that went unseen beneath night’s black shroud, the lantern didn’t reach up to his face, but his body shape was unmistakable as no part of it said anything.  
  
With it’s holder staggering back and forth, the lantern’s light dragged and Hugo did nothing but raise an impassive eyebrow.  
  
A little while later, a softly said “Okay, goodnight,” because Smit forgot why he’d walked outside in the first place. Swinging to about-face the lantern smacked into a tree, sent him off-weight and onto the ground, left him wheezing. When the ground swum up to his body all tender and slow the solidity of it was nice. Really nice, rendering him face-down for sixteen hours or so until two hands on either side of his torso lifted him up.  
  
Some kind of priceless touch. Pricelessness, absolute pricelessness for someone who sharpened a knife for the majority of his waking hours and light was leaking everywhere from the lantern which became bent but not broke.  
  
“Why’d—” in class he talked too little but everywhere else too much; on the soft earth beneath the second floor, there are shreds of pink, red, and duotonal bodies posing lewdly. “you ripped it up, it up. Why’d you rip it up? Aw, man. What’d, what’d’y do t’Shirl? Shirley? She okay? Oh, man...” and then, inexplicably, mild crying. Smit remembers beginning to cry here.  
  
Hugo shrugged. “I was bored,” came his voice on an inaudible frequency only Smit had access to.  
  
“That’s, that makes sense. Okay. I got it. M’sorry. Yeah. Going back now. Going back to the- the camp now. Bye. Sorry.”  
  
“What are you doing awake at this hour,” came his voice through the flex of his jaw.  
  
“I don’t... know...”  
  
“I see,” came his voice in the nod.  
  
“Yeah...” Still unaware his feet had ever touched the ground again and consequently unaware Hugo ever let go, a whine filled the space created by the hollow trees and flat expanse. “Oh, _shit._ You’re gonna drop me! Fuck! Don’t. Please. Care... _ful._ Be more... more...”  
  
“How?”  
  
This juncture was not long ago, but it was the first time Smit heard his voice from anywhere that wasn’t yards ahead or two rooms away. Not sure what to do, adrift and vulnerable in this twisting of everything, he turned again and goose stepped in some other direction without response until there was a bump and the ground became very, very close to his face a second time. This time, though, he didn’t hit it, his body did not turn to a concrete slab and a hand on his scruff kept him light and suspended.  
  
Vague tremblings of _what’s that, who’s that?_ His stomach swam, he muttered a series of expletives and felt blindly in circles for the lantern that was baking Hugo’s face yellow. He didn’t know _how,_ why ask him of all people, what has Smit ever known except for the nigh-entirety of German which he’ll probably never even have a use for. Distant windmills collapsed and someone inside the barn or bunker or whichever was coughing up a storm. A door was opened and gray poured out. He turned to say, _‘see, look, the smoke, that’s why, there it is, ‘s why I came outside’_   and Hugo’s face was behind him.  
  
Then, it was all rubber-stamped, sent to post, mailed across the sea, and something very real and electric and beautiful occurred, clicked. Blossoming grotesque within Smit’s drunk, itty little heart.The flutes all did the fluttery thing they do in romance movies, a distant orchestra reached it’s climax of the night and the audience swooned in splendor and adoration.  
  
By a hand tethered to a wrist tethered to a forearm tethered to an arm tethered to a shoulder tethered to a neck tethered to a dirt-caked, indifferent, lonesomeish and long face that became the nicest face because a deep thing clicked, he was not dropped.  
  
Hugo died maybe three months later.

Hugo died, the news came back, and Smit vowed to never drink again because he knew that same itty, calloused heart could not take any more.  
  
This... knocking. He can’t answer the door, his face is too red because he’s been thinking about awful things like making out and sitting on the laps of men. He’s horizontal across the bedspread, stirred up, hugging a pillow in the absence of a body and his knees are knocking together hard enough to produce sound.  
  
“The Standartenführer has sent me to wake you.” This is said as steely as a command. Then, as if testing hospitality: “How are you today, Mr. Utivich?”  
  
Anyway, Hugo died and is dead and wouldn’t approve of what Smit is getting up to these days. He’d just shake his head like he’s doing now over there by the coathanger, and Smit’s face is frozen solid toward that direction with eyes blown wide with fear.  
  
“I’m great,” he lies as he drags himself out of this hallucination. He doesn’t like _Mr. Utivich_ either. He has nothing to do with whoever that is. It’s scary. It’s too mature. It’s more of an adult than he is or will ever be. The name gives him an image of his father rather than himself. It’s like _Standartenführer,_ a title that takes him out of it, out of everything.  
  
“Pleasant. You look like a tomato. I’m very interested in hearing how you speak German when you are not intoxicated. Could I hear that now?” Rosenbluth enters the room and asks no questions about anything. A nightstand is gone through, things are pocketed.  
  
“For what?”  
  
“There is no reason, I am simply interested. It is entirely up to you.”  
  
The towel is too snug, and when Rosenbluth is not looking Smit starts feeling around his jugular again. Hugo doesn’t like this either. He stutters his way through reciting some German: “I, uh. I don’t understand a lot and- okay. I’m not good with... sentence...s, with more than three. Three verbs? I read it better than I speak it.”  
  
“Hmm. Well. You speak German with a Swiss accent,” Rosenbluth ponders gently- clearly not intended as an insult, but Smit does feel a spike of anxiety. “I have a nephew who sounds similarly to you.”  
  
“Is that good?”  
  
“He is a troublemaker. He likes dunking his younger sister’s kittens into buckets of spoilt milk. So far, he has drowned four. What a terrible set of things for you to remind me of.”  
  
“Oh, I’m– sorry, that’s really bad. I didn’t mean to. I had no idea.”  
  
Rosenbluth makes a face and it says that if the state would allow him the pleasure of doing so, he would laugh at his own joke. “Do not apologize. I was... japing. I sometimes do that. In this way, I am more a troublemaker than my nephew will ever be.” He’s going through all of the drawers now, pocketing more things on occasion and stopping to question why the rose is missing more than half it’s petals, but when Smit has answered—”I... don’t know, actually,”— he seems to have forgotten the question. “Hmm. Yes. How were your drinks with the Standartenführer?”  
  
“He told you about that?”  
  
“I heard everything.”  
  
“I didn't see you in the dining hall- I guess, room–"  
  
“No. Everything.”  
  
And Smit laughs, nervously, picking at his lip. After a long stint of time he makes a sound, some kind of _‘Uhhhhhhhhrrrrm’_ sounding thing. It soaks into every drape of fabric in the room, completely douses them, and Rosenbluth tilts his head diagonally.  
  
They stare at one another. After a slow nod, his eyes dart back and forth like he’s sifting through a great code. He then responds with  _‘Aurrrrrrrrm’,_ stepping seamlessly into the role of housekeep by making the bed and collecting microfibers of glass that remain on the floor. “Hazardous.”  
  
“Hey, um. Uh, is he a..." No idea how to ask this. Smit searches, face blank, for the words that will make him not sound stupid, but as always they do not come or do not exist. "Is he a good person?”  
  
“The Standartenführer?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“In no conceivable way. However, you appear to enjoy yourself with and around him and I have no business in questioning your motivations.”  
  
Smit isn’t sure what he expected. His soul goes slack in his body and his head becomes heavy, too heavy for his neck. He lays down on the bed facing some direction that makes Rosenbluth invisible.  
  
Mr. Utivich is strategically dividing and conquering the Standartenführer’s kingdom and Rosenbluth squints with disbelief at the notion that he doesn’t know that. The notion that he doesn’t realize himself capable of unraveling that fortified mind, strewing things into places he does not know to look for them. There's no way to inadvertently fell a tower.  
Were he and the Lieutenant elsewhere, with the Allies or dead, the Standartenführer would have a single room to himself here and everyone else would be left to their own devices. Three people would have vanished overnight alongside the sound of gunfire very closely resembling the same pistol Rosenbluth just picked up, the Standartenführer would become a miniature dictator, martial law would be imposed, Hermann would be dangling from a hook on the ceiling by now. And yet, in spite of the counterreality, there here is placidity. Affability, appearances, the way things seem, Hans delicately masquerading as the sort of person he wishes he was.  
  
In the doorway as he’s making to leave, Rosenbluth tosses on one more thing: “If you ever need something of me, do ask. Good evening, Mr. Utivich.”  
  
The door is closed.  
  
“Where is he?  Where is my little Smithson?”  
  
He taps an elaborate song with his fingers against the wall, one escalating in volume until the sound is coming from the wall just beside the bed.  
  
Ten minutes span Rosenbluth’s departure and Hans’ arrival. Thick leather meets the coathanger and obfuscates Hugo forever.  
  
Smit hears the sound of that voice, envisions the weight of his body and the way his fabric moves with him, and gets scared. He hides himself deeper so he won’t have to see him. If he keeps himself straight and flat it might seem like he’s sleeping, if he breathes lowly and doesn’t reach back to the hand that he knows is coming— but he slides down and towards him when Hans sits on the edge of the bed and the mattress dips. A big twitch from fraying nerves shakes his body as a response.  
  
Fingertips are then sliding along his nape and touching with such a gentleness that a sigh replaces the twitch.  
  
“Is he... here? Could this cuddly little thing here be him? I can’t tell, I have to see his face.”  
  
And Smit laughs. He laughs and turns because he did not diagram any of this out and even if he had the Standartenführer would have seen right through it.  
  
On the opposite side of the encounter, so enamored with film as he is, Hans visualizes the entire cross from the entryway to his side in slow motion, adorned by a quarter of falling, romantic strings and a wistfully-played accordion. Truthful indeed, Smithson does look gorgeous tonight- the side of his face and the start of where his lips incline to fold over each other are both tinted blue from the reflection of the night; a refreshing break from yellow.  
  
“Here. Look what I brought for you.”  
  
He can’t help himself from looking, and hung out before his eyes are a set of clothes. Clean, not dense-looking, just like the ones he’d get in the care packages his family would send and Smit sits up without thinking about it.  
Upon shedding his overjacket he feels unbelievably naked and hollow, moreso than usual, and he is slower to take off his tank top. He almost can't convince himself to do it and one large something sitting in his brain talks him out of it. In all of this, in the terse little set of seconds where he's playing with his thumbs and staring downward, he is under eyes that could pin him to the ground. Hans watches, and the implicit background is obvious, but his smile is forthcoming and genuine, removed from the stomach-liquefying looks over breakfast. This is benign and has nothing to do with any of that.  
  
The towel was an oversight and the tank top can’t be pulled over it and Hans assumes that to be the problem. “Here,” he says, pulling it off and marveling. “As you can see, I decided to bring you these myself. Doing so puts me a bit higher up the ladder, does it not?”  
  
_How’d you get up there?_   Smit pictures splinters of the ladder shrieking out of the opposite end of a woodchipper, and not knowing how else to react to this image he laughs awkwardly while half of his face molts and drops off. He shakes so much the bedposts jitter with him. The _modestly terrifying_ comment swims through a swarm of hazed thoughts and notions and viciously attacks. This shirt is linen, it’s buttons are sturdy.  
  
“Yyyyyeeeah. Um, yeah. Real high. I’m. Than, thanks- thank you.”  
  
“My most infinite pleasure. Now, we don’t want you to get cold, do we? Put it on.”  
  
Smit’s fingers tremble the buttons through the holes because he is deathly afraid and he wants to hold Nice Hans’ hand, wants to sit on Nice Hans’ lap and feel more of Nice Hans’ mouth because there is some security in that. Someone has lodged a pole into his brain and a vicious migraine is on, the sores on his feet are again existent with a vengeance, but Nice Hans’ presence and attention provides a stronghold, a garrison of cement and steel that bars the rest of the world from coming in. Nice Hans ended the war and is mainlining Smit back to his parents and his glorified tenement and his sweeper job and the everpresent smog of his city and Foreign Languages. He’ll go back home, be whole, be calm. He’ll take the train as close as it’ll take him and walk the rest of the way to Nantucket when the time comes.

With his head cocked and his entire body bent to the side for absolutely no reason, linen rubbing against his skin, Smit sits there looking at Hans like he is the best the world has to offer. The difference is that his face is not baked yellow by a lantern, but that same yellow has become everywhere—

There’s a pair of pants, too. Woolen and densely knit and they look like they’ll snug better than his longjohns do, pajama-looking things, so Smit gets to easing his buttons loose. Halfway through this he remembers beneath these coveralls there’s nothing and he tries to signal this with a look, a halted “Um...”

Hans is up, his tie becomes a long extension of his arm as he pulls it loose and folds it with precision. Had Rosenbluth not come in here, not spiffied everything up and down and not wiped the... vomit up, which he apparently did, Smit does not remember this happening, that same tie would've touched it now. It's draped over the nightstand. The belt in his midriff is removed, the coat's buttons and medals clink when he shrugs it off. To the coat hanger it goes. Hugo is trying to say something back there, but only his eyebrows are visible now. Hans hums, mutters some joyless quip about how his dress shirt strongly needs to be pressed as it comes off as well. In fear of creases, he hangs it over a bedpost, his boots crunch as he removes them, Smit is _severely_ confused- and when his real belt is removed, the one at his waist, his stomach takes a plunge. The sound crooks its finger. The images are too vivid. A metallic _chink,_ like glasses knocking together. Hans gives him a smile, a small one.  
  
“I also brought some sweets. Well, just the one. How do you feel in regard to cake, and vanilla specifically at that? I took a guess- though I think next time chocolate would be preferable, hm?- and there is some frosting here in case you like that, a little... around the back, there is some... Oh! Tsk, how cute. I didn’t notice that before. Look.” Hans turns back from the dresser with his cake and illustrated on it’s sides are bulbs of flowers, pink and stemmed pastel. “Or would you like to have dinner first? I hope breakfast wasn’t the last thing you had to eat?”  
  
He hasn't eaten, no. Smit has petrified into stone, fingers caught in the middle clasp. He coughs when he goes too long without breathing. “Yeah, I like vanilla. It’s... cause it tastes great. We can do what you want to do, I don't-”  
  
“Having trouble?”  
  
“Um,” louder, more panicked. _Is_ he having trouble? Nice Hans moves inward to help, puts down the decorative little cake and only pauses when a black tuft of lower hair becomes visible.  
  
Hans, knowing himself in the realm of self-control, simply draws backward. “I’ll wait for you to change. Tell me when to come back out.”  
  
An antiquated habit of his is the act of pacing, something he was forced to drop when the stick of discipline in his adolescence became a rod. When his shoulders were forced to stiffen and his posture beamed upright, he resolved with himself to never catch his footsteps rounding in a pace– and yet, when his body grows impatient or the circumstances are unfavorable he will not refrain from relapsing. Upon seeing the rose and it’s crushed, few petals now becoming a low hot pink color due to the grip of death, he fell into circles, hands tight behind his back. Any faster and he would simply be spinning. Is there some matter with his date tonight? He’s been making a face and his eyes are no longer baby blue, Hans’ picturesque adored _hellblau_ ; Smithson’s eyes have turned the lilt of the sky after a storm.  
  
“Hans?”

He nearly prefixed the name with _nice-_ and he should have, because that's who he wants—  
  
With the precision of a diver Hans practically throws himself out of the bathroom. Hell itself was scratching at him in there. “Mm?”  
  
The new pants fit worse than the longjohns and that is some feat. Smit himself is very aware the previous ones already did not fit him, but these hang lower and sphere his waist with no dedication whatsoever, not to mention their being held up at the moment.  
  
“No, uh, shorts, right?"  
  
Where would he find those now? Hans doesn’t know where he’d find those. This is the one street in this town with a proper road and it’s not even complete. "Would you like those?"  
  
“Uh... no. I don’t wanna... ask for... this much stuff.”  
  
“But you didn’t ask for these. Do they not fall under your gift principle? Shouldn’t I shower you?”  
  
Smit’s nerves cool and he smiles and the planet flips on its axis. Sitting again carefully with the pile in his hands, he sifts through— Socks! Without holes!—  and a little bit later, afraid of becoming Mr. Utivich, he reclines and sticks both arms out ahead of him until Hans understands the cue. Never has he ever kissed a man before last night, but he's wanted to, God has he wanted to. He was drunk so it doesn't count. His itty heart disqualified it, it was not real, too improbable and did not ossify itself. He wraps his arms around Hans' back, his neck, they kiss. "No, it's- it's good, you don't have to get me _any_ thing, you really don't have, have to," he says, voice cracking hard, oversized pants now betraying him entirely but Nice Hans the Prude knows better than to look down there because the Standartenführer is not interested in a juvenile romance—

But for one grotesque and depraved moment where the sound of the belt unbuckling is on a stiff repeat in his mind, Smit wants nothing else than to be touched. He turns his chin but Hans' mouth follows him, he wanted to make sure it would. Another bit of the _everything_ Rosenbluth apparently heard, but Hugo for the moment is only eyebrows, so it's okay. It's okay for a little while. The nest is warm and it is kissing his forehead and breathing him in.

The center of the bed is the warmest spot, the walls are still yellow. There is security when Smit feels himself being coddled forward atop his lap, and when the stains on his neck are being multiplied and worsened he thinks conveniently of nothing and lolls the weight of his head to allow more access. This makes him far away, makes everything better, different, ends the war, sends the bells ringing. Hugo is saying something in his mother tongue and luckily Smit speaks no German. When the stains on his neck are being multiplied and worsened, he feels himself tumbling into the look Shirley had before being reduced to shreds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You have my heart for feedback and kudos, my love is reaching out to embrace you. Thank yooooou. Again, apologies for how long this one took.


End file.
